THEBCKWOOD'GROUP 

BY SIR GEORGE 
DOUGLAvS 




FAMOUS 

•SCOTS* 

SERIES* 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



>r;'C^r^>'»M 




00D13STS5t,a 



THE 'black: 

WOOD' GROUP 



FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 

The following Volumes are now ready:— 

THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. 

ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. 

HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask. 

JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. 

ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. 

THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. 

RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. 

SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. 

THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden 
Blaikie. 

JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. 

TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton 

FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond. 

THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas. 



THE black; 

WOOD* GROUP 

BY 
5IR GEORGE 
DOUGLAS 



i^ 



FAMOUS 
SCOTS- 
SERIES- 



PUBLISHED BY 
CHARLES •^r!«»5S 

scribner's sons 

fSi?*r NEW YORK 

" (3 ' 








3293 



J^ 



Major-general Sir WILLIAM GROSSMAN, K.G.M.G., 

IN REMEMBRANCE OF HOURS IN TWO LIBRARIES. 



THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. 

JOHN WILSON. 
JOHN GALT. 
D. M. MOIR (* DELTA'). 
MISS FERRIER. 
MICHAEL SCOTT. 
THOMAS HAMILTON. 



NoU — The Ettrick Shepherd and John Gibson Lockhart, con- 
spicuous by their absence from the above list of writers associated 
with the early days of the publishing-house of Blackwood, will receive 
attention in forthcoming volumes of the series. 



JOHN WILSON 

Is it too bold a thing to say that the reputation of 
'Christopher North/ the man, has survived that of his 
works? Third in the great dynasty of Scottish literary 
sovereigns, he ascended the throne upon the death of 
Scott, reigned gloriously and held high state in the 
Northern Capital — whence in earlier days he had waged 
direst war — and at his death passed on the sceptre to 
Carlyle, from whom in turn it descended to Stevenson. 
To us of to-day, he looms on the horizon of the past, the 
representative of a vanished race of physical and intel- 
lectual giants, — the historic legend revealing him as before 
all things a good man of his inches, a prince of boon- 
companions and good-fellows, a wit, a hard hitter, the 
soul and centre of a brilliant circle, and the author of 
the Nodes AmbrosiancB. Many other works he wrote 
— important in their own day — but now not unjustly 
forgotten, or all but forgotten. But the man himself was 
greater than his works ; he, more than they, is our endur- 
ing possession ; his memory it behoves us to preserve. 

The story of his life has been told, in terms of 
aflfectionate appreciation, by his daughter, Mrs Gordon. 
Born at Paisley — in a neighbourhood where that natural 
beauty to which he was so susceptible was still at that 
time almost unsullied — on the i8th May 1785, he was the 

9 



lo FAMOUS SCOTS 

eldest of his parents' sons and their fourth child. His 
father, a gauze-manufacturer by trade, was possessed of 
considerable wealth ; whilst through his mother, whose 
maiden name was Sym, and who claimed descent from 
the great Marquis of Montrose, he had inherited a strain 
of * gentle' blood. From the first he was a robust 
and lively boy, and his childhood, being passed under 
the most favourable of conditions, was an entirely happy 
one. His taste for field-sport first declared itself at 
the early age of three years, when equipped with willow- 
wand, thread, and crooked pin, he set off, unattended, 
on an adventurous angling expedition. Meantime the 
parallel mental activity, which was to be through life 
his characteristic, was manifested in quaint infantine 
pulpit-oratory at home. After receiving the rudiments 
of instruction at Paisley, he was placed as a boarder 
with the minister of the neighbouring parish of Mearns, 
with whom he remained until his twelfth year. Here 
he was not less happy than at home. Without doors — 
and one thinks of him as a boy whose life was spent 
chiefly in the open air — he had a wide and beautiful 
country to range ; whilst within, his education proceeded 
merrily — he was foremost among his young companions 
at the task as well as in the playground — and he was 
carefully trained in the paths of wisdom and virtue. 
In later life his memory reverted fondly to these 
days, to which his writings contain various references — 
as when he tells of boyish shooting experiences, with an 
antiquated musket, traditionally supposed to have been 
* out ' in both the Fifteen and the Forty-five, of an 
adventure in a storm when lost upon the moors, and so 
forth. In his twelfth year he lost his father, and soon 



JOHN WILSON II 

afterwards he was placed at the University of Glasgow, 
where he continued to attend classes until the year 1803. 
Here he resided in the house of the Professor of Logic, 
Professor Jardine, to whom and to the Greek Professor, 
Young, he in later life gratefully acknowledged his debt. 
Meantime his mother with her young family had gone to 
live in Edinburgh. 

There and at Glasgow, from January to October 1801, 
young Wilson kept a diary, which was preserved, and 
from which his biographer prints some extracts. These 
are disappointing ; but the document itself is remarkable 
for orderliness and precision, exhibiting the writer as the 
very pattern of a well-brought-up youth. More interesting, 
however, as a manifestation of character is the impulse 
which, in the year following, led the seventeen-year-old 
young man to address a letter of generous admiration, not, 
however, untempered with criticism, to the author of the 
Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth replied, and thus was begun 
an intercourse which was afterwards destined to ripen into 
friendship. 

In June 1803, Wilson was transferred from Glasgow to 
Oxford, where he was entered as a gentleman-commoner 
of Magdalen College. He began his career there with 
ambitious views, his course of study, as shown by his 
commonplace books, being designed to embrace not only 
the prescribed curriculum in the Ancient Classics, but 
studies in Law, History, Philosophy, and Poetry as well. 
But, if he read hard — as, with occasional intermxissions, 
he undoubtedly did — he also entered with zest into the 
athletics and other amusements of the place, testing his 
prowess in wrestling, leaping, boating, and running, and, 
at the same time, indulging in what to a later age may 



12 FAMOUS SCOTS 

appear the more questionable sports of pugilism and cock- 
fighting. Some traditions of the feats then performed by 
him survive. Among these are stories of his triumphant 
encounter with a certain redoubtable pugilist who had 
insulted him ; of his coming out one night from a dinner- 
party in Grosvenor Square, and proceeding then and there 
to walk back to Oxford — accomplishing the distance of 
fifty-eight miles in some eight or nine hours; or, of his clear- 
ing the river Cherwell at a flying leap — twenty-three feet in 
breadth on the dead level. Yet, these distractions not- 
withstanding, he succeeded in passing the examination for 
his Bachelor's Degree, in a manner which his tutor charac- 
terised as 'glorious,' and in producing such an impres- 
sion of scholarship on the minds of the Examiners as to 
call forth the rare testimony of a public expression of their 
thanks. He also carried off the Newdigate Prize, av/arded 
for English verse. In commenting on the amiability of 
his disposition, his biographer observes that he harboured 
not an envious thought. But surely to have done so 
were a very superfluity of naughtiness ; for, gifted as he 
was, by fortune as well as nature, whom was it possible 
for this admirable youth to envy ? 

After taking his degree, he still continued for a time to 
frequent Oxford, astonishing the younger members of the 
common-room of his college by his extraordinary con- 
versational powers and by occasional quaint freaks, but 
at the same time delighting them by his good-humour. 
It is told of him at this time that he would sometimes 
indulge his fancy by resorting to the coaching-inns at the 
hour of the arrival of the mails, presiding at the travellers' 
supper-table, and hob-nobbing with all and sundry, whom 
his wit and pleasantry seldom failed to impress. At this 



JOHN WILSON 13 

era his personal appearance is described as especially 
striking. It was that of a man of great muscular strength, 
but lightly built ; about five feet ten inches in height, with 
uncommon breadth of chest; florid, and wearing a pro- 
fusion of hair, and enormous whiskers — the latter being 
in those days very unusual. De Quincey says he was 
not handsome, but against such testimony we may surely 
set off that of Raeburn's portrait, painted a few years 
earlier. 

These ought to have been golden days, indeed, but 
much of their happiness was marred by an unlucky love- 
affair. At Glasgow, some years before, Wilson had made 
the acquaintance of a young lady of great charm of person 
and character, who in the biography figures as * Margaret,' 
or The Orphan Maid. The impression which she pro- 
duced upon him was profound and lasting, and at parting 
he had inscribed to her a small volume of manuscript 
poems of his own. From this point the biographer is 
rather vague in her account of the progress of the attach- 
ment ; yet we have abundant evidence that its course was 
a most troubled one. For instance, in August 1803, we 
find our hero writing to a friend in the following desperate 
strain : — * By heavens ! I will, perhaps, some day blow my 
brains out, and there is an end of the matter.' Later he 
says : ' The word happy will never again be joined to the 
name of John Wilson.' And again he speaks of sum- 
moning two friends to support him and pass with him the 
night on which Margaret was to be married to another. 
This dreaded marriage did not take place, but it is quite 
evident that the lover long continued in a most unsettled 
state of mind. Thus we hear of his having swallowed 
laudanum, lost his powers of study, indulged in ' unbridled 



14 FAMOUS SCOTS 

dissipation ' ; of sudden aimless journeys, undertaken on 
the spur of the moment, and landing him at nightfall at 
such unlikely places as Coventry or Nottingham ; of soli- 
tary rambles in Ireland and in Wales. * Whilst I keep 
moving,' he writes, in October 1805, Mife goes on well 
enough ; but whenever I pause the fever of the soul 
begins.' He even entertained an idea of joining the 
expedition of Mungo Park to Timbuctoo. No doubt in 
all this he believed himself sincere enough at the time, 
but it is not necessary for us to take his utterances quite 
seriously. The blowing out of brains has been alluded 
to, and it seems more than probable that a point of 
Wertherism entered into his distemper. At any rate, in giving 
an order for the works of Rousseau at the time, he is careful 
to emphasize his desire to have them complete. In dis- 
missing the episode it may be mentioned that, though the 
various obstacles to a union between himself and Margaret 
are not detailed, in his case filial obedience would seem to 
have been the final deterrent. 

During a tour in the English lake country in 1805, 
Wilson had fallen in love with and purchased the property 
of EUeray, consisting of a delightful cottage-residence, 
standing in grounds of its own, and commanding lovely 
views of mountain, lawn, and forest scenery, rising above 
the waters of Lake Windermere ; and it was there that, on 
leaving Oxford in 1807, he took up his abode. He was 
now in the fullest sense his own master, and at this point 
it may be worth while briefly to take note of his attitude 
towards life. 

The ideal of the sound mind in the sound body has. 
been universally recognised as a good one ; but, whether 
deliberately or instinctively, Wilson seems to have aimed 



JOHN WILSON IS 

higher still. He aspired to the mind of a philosopher in 
the body of an athlete ; and the word philosopher must 
here be taken in its highest sense — to signify not the 
thinker only, but the lover of wisdom for its own sake. A 
saner or loftier ideal could scarcely be conceived ; and 
Nature, who too often unites the soaring mind with 
the body which does it previous wrong, had in this case 
given the means of attaining, or at least approaching it. 
Thus the Christopher North of this period remains a pos- 
session and a standard of manhood to his countrymen. He 
brings home to them the Hellenic ideal, pure and unviti- 
ated by any taint of Keatsian sensuality, as Goethe had 
brought it home to Germany. In the process of naturali- 
zation that ideal underwent some modification ; but the 
fact that the poetry which North wrote at this time was of 
perishable quality does not in reaHty detract from the 
service which he rendered to his country. 

For poetical composition seems to have been now the 
serious business of his life. As for his diversions, they 
remained of the same healthy type as in his Oxford days. 
The sailing of a fleet of boats on Windermere, and the 
rearing of game birds were perhaps his special hobbies ; 
but wherever manly exercises were to the fore, there was he 
to be found. The country in which he was now located 
being a wrestling country, he became an enthusiastic patron 
of that excellent exercise, and effected much for its en- 
couragement. And at the same time he was free of the 
society of Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, and the 
other able and gifted men whose presence made the 
.district at that era a centre of intellectual light. 

Amid these varied interests, two or three years were 
passed contentedly enough ] but at the end of that time 



1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

we find Wilson writing to a friend of his need of an 
anchor in Hfe. * I do not, I hope, want either ballast, or 
cargo, or sail,' he writes, ' but I do want an anchor most 
confoundedly, and, without it, shall keep beating about 
the great sea of life to very little purpose/ This 
* anchor ' he was fated to find in the person of Miss 
Jane Penny, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, a 
favourite partner of his own at the local dances, and at 
that time the * leading belle of the Lake Country,' to 
whom he was happily married on the nth May 1811. 

His marriage had the effect of somewhat delaying 
the publication of a volume of poetry which he had 
previously been preparing for the press, and it was not 
until February of the following year that The Isle of 
Palms, and Other Poems made its appearance— -having 
been shortly preceded by an anonymously-published elegy 
on the death of James Grahame, author of The Sabbath, 

The Isle of Palms tells in mellifluous numbers the 
story of a pair of lovers, shipwrecked on an island 
paradise in tropic seas, who espouse each other in 
the sight of Nature and Heaven. Of course the idyll 
rresistibly recalls Bernardin's masterpiece, and, judging 
between the two, it must be acknowledged that in 
originality and artistic perfection the Frenchman's prose 
has greatly the advantage. But it is noticeable and must 
be counted to Wilson's credit that, whilst profoundly 
influenced by pre-Revolutionary thought, he never, even 
at this early period of his life, allows himself to be led 
away from the paths prescribed by virtue and religion. 
His healthy instinct, fortified by excellent training, 
sufficed to show him that anarchy in the moral world is 
no more a part of nature's scheme than is habitual excess ; 
and thus the worship of Liberty and the State of Nature, 



JOHN WILSON 17 

which afterwards led to such questionable results in the 
cases of Byron and of Shelley, left him entirely unharmed. 
It is true that rigid formalists have been found to object 
to the ' natural marriage ' of the lovers in the poem, de- 
ploring the absence of a clergyman on the island. But 
with these we need not concern ourselves. 

The success of the poems/ was but moderate ; yet it 
sufficed to bring the author into notice in Edinburgh, 
where he and his wife were spending the season with his 
mother and sisters, and whence Sir Walter Scott wrote 
of him, in a letter to Joanna Baillie, as 'an excellent, 
warm-hearted, and enthusiastic young man,' adding that, 
' Something too much, perhaps, of the latter quality ' placed 
him upon the list of originals. 

Dividing his time between Edinburgh and Elleray, the 
young poet now continued to vary his active open-air life 
by the plotting and composition of new poems, and in 
these pursuits, had his affairs continued prosperous, it is 
quite possible that the remainder of his life might have 
been spent. For it is a truism that any large measure of 
happiness is unfavourable to enterprise, and what young 
Wilson now really stood in need of was some stimulus to 
exertion from without. Such stimulus duly arrived, 
taking the form of what in a worldly sense is known as 
ruin. To speak more circumstantially, in the fourth year 
after his marriage, the unencumbered fortune of ;^5o,ooo 
which he had enjoyed from the time of his father's death, 
was, through the dishonesty of an uncle who had acted as 
steward of the estate, entirely lost to him.* But, severe 

* It is distinctly stated in the Life^ vol. i, p. 180, that the loss of 
fortune was complete; but a subsequent statement is somewhat at 
variance with this.. 

B 



i8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

as this blow was, his biographers are agreed in pronouncing 
it to have been a blessing in disguise, and the means of 
bringing out much that was in the man, which would 
otherwise in all probability have been lost to the world. 

It was now, of course, necessary for him to put his 
shoulder to the wheel, and, with the exception of Sir 
Walter Scott, perhaps no man ever rose more manfully 
or uncomplainingly to the occasion. But between these 
parallel cases there was one great difference ; for Scott's 
misfortunes fell upon him when he was advanced in years 
and worn with toil, whilst Wilson was able to bring the 
prime of youth and strength to bear upon his troubles. 
He now took up his abode altogether in Edinburgh, 
being gladly received into the house of his mother, — a 
lady who to a fine presence and strong and amiable 
character added notable house-keeping talents, which enabled 
her during several successive years to accomplish the 
somewhat difficult and delicate task of making three 
separate families comfortable and happy under one roof. 
In the same year, 1815, Wilson was called to the Scots 
Bar. But, though for a year or two to come he seems to 
have made a point of staying in Edinburgh whilst the 
Courts were sitting, a short experience sufficed to con- 
vince him that his vocation did not lie in that direction. 
It was some time before he succeeded in settHng down to 
congenial work, and, indeed, what we hear most of during 
the next year or so are pedestrian and fishing excursions 
to the Highlands. Whilst on these expeditions great 
would be the distances which he compassed on foot, im- 
mense the baskets of fish which he brought home. On 
one of them, he had his wife as his companion, when the 
happy Bohemianism of the young couple — or, as some 



JOHN WILSON 19 

would have it, the poet's eccentricity of conduct — led them 
into some queer experiences. Among his adventures we 
may specify a contest in the four manly arts of running, 
leaping, wrestling, and drinking, with a local champion 
nicknamed King of the Drovers, in which Wilson came 
off victorious. 

In March 1816 appeared his second volume of verse, 
entitled The City of the Plague. This poem forms a 
startling contrast to the Isle of Falms, for, in place of 
nature at its softest and sentiment sweet to the point of 
cloying, we are now presented with the gloomiest and 
ghastliest of studies in the charnel-house style. Several 
of the scenes depicting the madness of the London streets 
at the period of the great pestilential visitation are by no 
means without a certain power, which, however, inclines 
to degenerate into violence. Two young sailors — certainly 
most unlike to all preconceived notions of the seamen of 
the age of Blake — help to supply the necessary relief and 
' sentiment,' of which there is no lack. But, from beginning 
to end, there is little or nothing truly poetical in the tragedy. 
The movement of its blank verse is most frequently harsh 
and jolting, and serves to confirm one in the opinion that 
the author was well-inspired when he abandoned poetry, 
as he was now to do. Nor do the minor poems which 
make up the remainder of the volume show cause for 
altering this judgment. Certainly they abound, even to 
excess, in evidence of the love of nature ; but that alone 
never yet made a poet. 

The transition which now lay before the author was an 
abrupt and violent one. From the world of nature and 
sentiment in which he had hitherto dwelt undisturbed, he 
found himself summoned to pass into the arena of perio- 



20 FAMOUS SCOTS 

dical literature, and that in an age when not only was it 
the misfortune of such Hterature to be before all things 
political, but when political feeling ran to a pitch of which 
at the present day it is difficult even to form a concep- 
tion, — when the mere designations Whig and Tory, as 
mutually applied, were regarded less as party distinctions 
than as terms of abuse or reproach. And, to add to the 
contrast which lay before Wilson, the place in which he 
was called to take this step was precisely that in which 
the war of periodicals was destined to be w^aged most 
keenly. In order properly to understand the circum- 
stances which led to this warfare, it is necessary to go 
back some years. 

The horrors of the French Revolution had been 
followed in Edinburgh by a strong Tory reaction — a 
reaction of the excesses of which Henry Cockburn, in 
his Memorials, has left a highly-coloured and perhaps not 
unprejudiced account. In 1802, as a counterpoise to over- 
whelming Tory supremacy, and a rallying-point for those 
thereto opposed, the Edinburgh Review had been estab- 
lished. It was supported by a group of remarkably able 
young men, whose talents soon raised it to a position of 
unexampled influence in the world of letters. That it 
performed excellent service in the cause of enlightenment 
is undeniable; yet it failed to bear itself with all the 
moderation proper to success, and in time showed 
signs of becoming in its turn a tyranny. Those who 
were opposed to it, whilst regarding as dangerous its 
opinions in politics and religion, also grew tired (in 
their own words) of its flippancy and conceit. Now it 
happened that about this time a certain new magazine, 
recently founded by a very shrewd and enterprising 



JOHN WILSON 21 

Edinburgh publisher, alter languishing for some months 
under incompetent editorship, had reached the very point 
of dissolution. In this periodical the Tory malcontents 
saw an instrument ready to their hands. New spirit was 
infused into its nerveless frame, and in October 1817 
appeared the first number of Blackwood's remodelled 
Edinburgh Magazine. And among those who gave the 
hot fresh blood of youth to revive its languishing exist- 
ence, one of the foremost was John Wilson. It may be 
mentioned that before this he had contributed a literary 
article to the rival organ, with the presiding genius of 
which he was on terms of friendship. His new depar- 
ture led to a rupture of that friendship, but to hold that 
his acts had committed him to the support of the Edin- 
burgh Review would be to put an altogether strained 
construction upon them. 

A detailed history of the stormy first years of the new 
publication, however piquant and racy it might be made, 
forms no part of our present scheme. Suffice it to remind 
the reader that the ' success of scandal ' which the maga- 
zine at once obtained is matter of notoriety ; nor can that 
success be pronounced undeserved. Indeed the very first 
number of the new issue, besides scathing articles on 
Coleridge and Leigh Hunt, contained the celebrated 
* Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript ' — after- 
wards suppressed — consisting of a thinly-veiled attack upon 
a rival magazine, and abounding in gross personalities to 
the address of leading citizens of Edinburgh. These 
excesses, though the cause of much heart-burning at the 
time, can scarcely be pronounced of enduring interest; 
and it is more profitable, as well as more pleasing, to turn 
to the other side of the picture. For it must not by any 



2 2 FAMOUS SCOTS 

means be supposed that the new venture relied solely 
upon objectionable personalities for attracting and holding 
its readers. * These/ as Wilson's biographer observes, 
'would have excited but a slight and temporary notice, 
had the bulk of the articles not displayed a rare com- 
bination of much higher qualities;' and she goes on to 
say that whatever subjects were discussed were handled 
with a masterly vigour and freshness, and developed with 
a fulness of knowledge and variety of talent that could 
not fail to command respect even from the least approving 
critic. Still it is undeniable that for many months to 
come the series of onslaughts was kept up almost without 
intermission, whilst even persons locally as highly and as 
justly respected as Chalmers and Playfair were made to 
feel the sting of the lash. Consisting as it did of a re- 
crudescence of the discountenanced literary methods of 
the age of Smollett, all this is regrettable enough, and of 
much of it there can be little doubt that ' The Leopard ' 
— to give Wilson the name which he bore in the maga- 
zine — was art and part. His exact share in productions 
which were not merely anonymous but of which mystifi- 
cation was an essential feature is impossible to trace ; but 
we are glad at least to have the assurance of his daughter 
that, amid all the violence of language and extravagance 
of censure which disfigured his early contributions to the 
magazine, she has been unable to bring home to his hand 
'any instance of unmanly attack, or one shade of real 
malignity.' Our knowledge of the man's character makes 
us ready enough to believe that he did not mean to give 
pain ; whilst there is always this excuse — whatever it may 
be worth — for Maga's early indiscretions : that they were 
the work of inexperienced men, carried away by the 



JOHN WILSON 23 

exuberance of their spirits, and genuinely — if indefensibly — 
ignorant of the laws of literary good manners, or, as one 
of themselves has expressed it, of the ^ structure and prac- 
tice of literature' as it existed at that day in Britain. 
With which reflection, an unthankful subject may be dis- 
missed. For ourselves the real significance of the 
magazine in its early days consists, not in stories of 
challenges sent or damages paid, but in the fact that 
it afiforded to John Wilson a first opportunity of giving 
full and free play to his talents. The characteristic of 
his genius was not so much fineness as abundance, 
and thus we may believe that his gain from the new 
stimulus to constant and rapid production more than 
balanced his loss from absence of opportunities of polish- 
ing his work. Certainly from the time of his active and 
regular employment, he began to throw off those tendencies 
to affectation and philandering which had characterised 
his early efforts in the * Lake ' school, and though he 
never quite lost the habit of as the French say ' caressing 
his phrase,' he became from henceforth more virile, more 
himself. 

Standing now to all appearance committed to literature 
as his vocation, in the year 181 9 he left his mother's 
hospitable roof, and removed with his wife and family 
to a small house of his own, situated in Ann Street, on 
the outskirts of the town, where, besides having Watson 
Gordon, the portrait-painter, for his immediate neighbour, 
he enjoyed the society of Raeburn and Allan among 
artists, and of Lockhart, Gait, Hogg, and the Hamiltons 
among Hterary men. 

In April of the year following, by the death of Dr 
Thomas Brown, the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the 



24 FAMOUS SCOTS 

University of Edinburgh became vacant. Wilson there- 
upon resolved to present himself as a candidate for it, as 
did Sir William Hamilton, and though the names of other 
aspirants are mentioned, from the first the real contest 
lay between these two. They had both been brilliant 
students at Oxford, but in almost every other respect their 
qualifications for the coveted post were about as different 
as could be; for since his college days Hamilton had 
devoted himself exclusively to the study of philosophy, 
and had now substantial results of his labours to exhibit, 
whilst Wilson — though we are expressly told that the study 
in question had always had a powerful attraction for him 
— was yet known to the world only as a daring and 
brilliant litterateur, and a genial and somewhat Bohemian 
personality. There is no need to say with which of the 
two, in such a competition, the advantage at first sight 
seemed to lie. But it is necessary to explain that the 
election was fought on political grounds, that Hamilton 
was a Whig, and that the electing body was the Town 
Council of Edinburgh. It is gratifying to be able to record 
that the candidates themselves remained upon friendly 
terms. But never had party-feeling been known to run so 
high as between their respective adherents, — so that, before 
the election was over, Wilson had been called on to face 
charges of being a * reveller,* which he probably was, a 
blasphemer, which we cannot think him ever to have 
been, and a bad husband and father, which he certainly 
was not. In the end he secured a majority of twelve out 
of thirty votes ; whilst an attempt to set aside his election, 
which was made at a subsequent meeting of the Council, 
ignominiously collapsed. 

Keenly alive to the responsibilities of a position which 



JOHN WILSON 25 

he cannot long have looked forward to occupying, the 
newly-made Professor at once devoted himself to prepara- 
tion for the discharge of his duties. Whilst thus en- 
gaged, his application was intense, — as well it might be, 
for it was stipulated that he was to deliver some hundred- 
and-fifty lectures during the forthcoming Session, and he 
had but four months in which to prepare them. Native 
genius, pluck and perseverance, however, carried him 
triumphantly over every obstacle. His first lecture has 
thus been described by one who was present on the 
occasion.* 

' There was a furious bitterness of feeling against him among the 
classes of which probably most of his pupils would consist, and al- 
though I had no prospect of being among them, I went to his first 
lecture prepared to join in a cabal, which I understood was formed to 
put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such 
a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their 
knobsticks, I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, 
amid profound silence. Everyone expected some deprecatory or 
propitiatory introduction of himself, and his subject, upon which the 
mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason ; but he began in 
a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up un- 
flinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause, a flow of rhetoric such 
as Dugald Stewart or Thomas Brown, his predecessors, never de- 
livered in the same place. Not a word, not a murmur escaped his 
captivated, I ought to say his conquered, audience, and at the end 
they gave him a right-down unanimous burst of applause. Those who 
came to scoff remained to praise. ' 

And from henceforth the Professor's enemies were 
silenced. 

It can scarcely fail to strike the reader that into 
Wilson's election to the professorship there had entered 
not a little of what was casual, or the result of impulse ; 

* Letter quoted by Mrs Gordon. 



2 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

still his lucky star must have ruled at the moment, for 
the sequel far more than justified his rashness. As poet 
he had been mediocre, and as lawyer * out of his element,* 
but there exists abundant testimony to prove that as 
lecturer and instructor of youth he was the right man in 
the right place. As was the way of his spirited and 
generous nature, he threw himself heart and soul into his 
new work ; but though we are assured that his attainments 
in that department left nothing to be desired, it was far 
less to these than to character and personality that he 
owed the success which he undoubtedly won. Certainly 
philosophers more profound, and probably men of greater 
general attainments have occupied his Chair, but assuredly 
never one who united his happy powers of breathing life 
into the instruction which he imparted and inspiring his 
scholars with a keen and quickening enthusiasm for him- 
self. And that he succeeded so well in this was perhaps 
due to the fact that, in addition to his wide and general 
humanity, there was about him a certain boyishness, 
which, when joined with the dignity and character of 
manhood, seldom fails in its appeal to youth. 

From among the multitude of pupils who cherished 
grateful and happy recollections of his class, his biographer 
has presented us with the testimony of three. The first 
of these is Hill Burton, the historian of Scotland, who 
warmly acknowledges his kindness, and whose future 
eminence the Professor would seem to have divined ; for, 
though at all times accessible to his pupils and conscien- 
tious in the discharge of his duties, he appears to have 
made a friend of Burton almost at the first meeting. 
Another of his students, Mr Alexander Taylor Innes, has 
left a picture of North in his lecture-room, from which, 



JOHN WILSON 27 

though it belongs by rights to a later date, I make no 
apology for quoting here. 

* His appearance in his class-room,' says that gentleman, * it is far 
easier to remember than to forget. He strode into it with the pro- 
fessor's gown hanging loosely on his arms, took a comprehensive look 
over the mob of young faces, laid down his watch so as to be out of 
the reach of his sledge-hammer fist, glanced at the notes of his lecture, 
and then, to the bewilderment of those who had never heard him 
before, looked long and earnestly out of the north window towards 
the spire of the old Tron Kirk ; until, having at last got his idea, he 
faced round and uttered it with eye and hand, and voice and soul and 
spirit, and bore the class along with him. As he spoke the bright 
blue eye looked with a strange gaze into vacancy, sometimes spark- 
ling with a coming joke, sometimes darkening before a rush of 
indignant eloquence ; the tremulous upper lip curving with every 
wave of thought or hint of passion, and the golden-grey hair floating 
on the old man's mighty shoulders — if, indeed, that could be called 
age which seemed but the immortality of a more majestic youth. 
And occasionally, in the finer frenzy of his more imaginative passages 
— as when he spoke of Alexander, clay-cold at Babylon, with the 
world lying conquered around his tomb, or of the Highland hills, that 
pour the rage of cataracts adown their riven cliffs, or even of the 
human mind, with its ** primeval granitic truths," the grand old face 
flushed with the proud thought, and the eyes grew dim with tears and 
the magnificent frame quivered with a universal emotion.' 

Yet another pupil, the Reverend Dr William Smith, of 
North Leith, has thus recorded his impressions : — 

* Of Professor Wilson as a lecturer on Moral Philosophy, it is not 
easy to convey any adequate idea to strangers, — to those who never 
saw his grand and noble form excited into bold and passionate action 
behind that strange, old-fashioned desk, nor heard his manly and 
eloquent voice sounding forth its stirring utterances with all the strange 
and fitful cadence of a music quite peculiar to itself. The many-sided- 
ness of the man, and the unconventional character of his prelections, 
combine to make it exceedingly diflicult to define the nature and 
grounds of his wonderful power as a lecturer. I am certain that if 
every student who ever attended his class were to place on record his 
impressions of these, the impressions of each student would be widely 



28 FAMOUS SCOTS 

different, and yet they would not, taken all together, exhaust the 
subject, or supply a complete representation either of his matter or his 
manner. . . . The roll of papers on which each lecture was written, 
which he carried into the class-room firmly grasped in his hand, and 
suddenly unrolled and spread out on the desk before him, commencing 
to read the same moment, could not fail to attract the notice of any 
stranger in his class-room. It was composed in large measure of 
portions of old letters — the addresses and postage-marks on which 
could be easily seen as he turned the leaf, yet it was equally evident 
that the writing was neat, careful and distinct ; and, except in a more 
than usually dark and murk day, it was read with perfect ease and 
fluency.* 

And, in reference to a certain specific lecture, the same 
gentleman adds, * The whole soul of the man seemed 
infused into his subject, and to be rushing forth with 
resistless force in the torrent of his rapidly-rolling words. 
As he spoke, his whole frame quivered with emotion. He 
evidently saw the scene he described, and such was the 
sympathethic force of his strong poetic imagination, that 
he made us, whether we would or not, see it too. Now 
dead silence held the class captive. In the interval of his 
words you would have heard a pin fall. Again, at some 
point, the applause could not be restrained, and was 
vociferous.' The writer concludes by stating that he has 
heard some of the greatest orators of the day, naming 
Lords Derby, Brougham, Lyndhurst ; Peel, O'Connell, 
Shell, Follett, Chalmers, Caird, Guthrie, M'Neile; and 
has heard them * in their very best styles make some of 
their most celebrated appearances ; but for popular elo- 
quence, for resistless force, for the seeming inspiration 
that swayed the soul, and the glowing sympathy that 
entranced the hearts of his entire audience, that lecture 
by Professor Wilson far excelled the best of these I ever 
listened to.' 



JOHN WILSON 29 

This, within its proper limits, is the strongest praise. 
And, on the other hand, we must guard against the 
supposition that these lectures — highly-coloured and 
emotional as they undoubtedly were — consisted solely, or 
even mainly, of oratorical, or conscious or unconscious 
dramatic display. We are assured that this was by no 
means the case ; that the Professor scorned to sacrifice 
the serviceable to the ornamental, never for a moment 
hesitating to grapple with the central difficulties of his 
subject, or shirking the irksome duty of * hammering ' at 
them during the greater part of a Session. 

Increased financial resources now enabled him to 
resume occupation of his beloved Elleray, where a new 
and larger dwelling-house, suitable to the accommodation 
of a family, had by this time been built. There, many of 
the intervals of his busy University life were spent in happy 
domesticity, and there, in 1825, he was visited by Sir 
Walter Scott, whom he feted with a brilliant regatta on 
Windermere. It is to these years of professional duties 
varied by vacations in the country that his novels and 
tales belong. They comprise three volumes, and, as their 
characteristics are identical, may be considered side by 
side. They consist uniformly of tales of pastoral or 
humble life, and the author has recorded that his object 
in writing them was to speak of the ' elementary feelings 
of the human soul in isolation, under the light of a veil 
of poetry.' The impression which they produce upon a 
reader of the present day is that this programme has been 
but too systematically adhered to. The stories them- 
selves do not lack interest, and their motives are at all 
times human ; but they are deliberately localized in some 
other world than ours, and if there thence ensues a certain 



30 FAMOUS SCOTS 

aesthetic gain, it is accompanied by a more than propor- 
tionate loss in vraisemblance and in moral force. To 
speak more plainly, if the world of Wilson's tales is a 
better world than ours, it yet remains an artificial one, his 
stories develope in accordance with the rules of a pre- 
conceived ideal, and a weakening of their interest is 
the result. For though many a writer has seen life in 
a way of his own, Wilson seems to have deliberately set 
himself to see it in a way belonging to somebody else. 
In fact, throughout this series of httle books, he aspires 
to appear in the character of a prose Wordsworth ; but he 
is a Wordsworth who has lost the noble plainness of his 
original, and though his actual style is less marred by 
floridness and redundancy here than elsewhere, still the 
vices of prettiness, self-consciousness, artificiality, and 
sentiment suffice to stamp his work as an imitation, 
decadent from the lofty source of its inspiration. 

Of the Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, a volume 
of short tales published in 1822, the not impartial author 
of the biography, writing in the early sixties, remarks that 
it has acquired a popularity of the most enduring kind — 
a statement which to-day one would hesitate to endorse. 
She adds that the stories are ^ poems in prose, in which, 
amid fanciful scenes and characters, the struggles of 
humanity are depicted with pathetic fidelity, and the 
noblest lessons of virtue and religion are interwoven, in no 
imaginary harmony, with the homely realities of Scottish 
peasant life.' And subject to the not inconsiderable 
abatements noted above, this may no doubt be accepted. 

The Foresters (1825) is the history of the family of one 
Michael Forester, who is exhibited in turn in his 
relation as a dutiful son, a kind self-sacrificing brother, a 



JOHN WILSON 31 

loving and faithful husband, and a wise affectionate 
father ; whilst from time to time we are also enabled to 
trace his beneficent influence in the affairs of other 
members of the small community in which he lives. The 
tone of the book is peaceful and soothing ; it inculcates 
cheerfulness and resignation, and holds up for our 
edification a picture of that contentment which springs 
from the practice of virtue. A group of faultless 
creatures — for none but the subordinate characters have 
any faults — pursue the tenor of their lives amid fair scenes 
of nature, and, when sorrow or misfortune falls to their 
lot, meet it with an inspiring fortitude. To scoff at such 
a book were to supply proof of incompetence in criticism — 
of which the very soul consists in sympathy with all that 
is sincere in spirit and not inadequate in execution. Yet 
equally uncritical were it to fail to mark how far short 
this story falls of the exquisite spontaneity of such work 
as Goldsmith's immortal essay in the same style. 

Possibly, however, of the three volumes, the Trials of 
Margaret Lyndsay ( 1 8 2 3 ) is that which most forcibly conveys 
the lessons common to all — the teaching of Wordsworth, 
that is to say, as made plain by a sympathetic disciple. 
It is the story of a beautiful and virtuous maiden, the 
daughter of a printer who, having become imbued with 
the doctrines of Tom Paine, falls into evil courses and 
is imprisoned on a charge of sedition. His family — 
consisting of Margaret, her ailing mother, aged grand- 
mother, and two sisters, one of whom is mentally afflicted 
and the other blind — are in consequence reduced to great 
poverty, which, supported by their piety, they endure with- 
out complaint. Removing from their country home to a 
dark and narrow street in Edinburgh, they open a small 



32 FAMOUS SCOTS 

school, and for a time with fair success make head 
against their troubles. But misfortune follows relent- 
lessly upon their traces. Lyndsay dies in disgrace, 
Margaret's sailor sweetheart perishes by drowning, 
and one after the other she sees the members of the 
little group which surrounds her removed by death. 
Still she does not lose heart. Left alone in the world, 
she is received into the house of a benevolent young 
lady, and, there, is happy enough, until the 
undesired attentions of the young lady's brother 
compel her to seek another home. Journeying alone 
and on foot, she seeks a refuge with a distant and 
estranged relation ; by whom she is coldly received, but 
upon whose withered heart her gentle influence in time 
works the most happy change. And now, at length, it 
seems that her hardly-won happiness is to be crowned 
by marriage to the man of her choice. But what has 
seemed her good fortune turns out to be in reality the 
worst of all her woes ; for the brave but dissolute soldier 
who has won her heart is discovered to possess a wife 
already. Thus from trial to trial do we follow her, until 
at last she is left in possession of a very modest share of 
felicity, whilst from her story we learn the lesson of the 
duties of courage and cheerfulness, the consolations of 
virtue, and the healing power of nature. 

But of course it is not to the department of fiction 
that Wilson's most conspicuous literary achievements be- 
long. When once he had settled down into the swing of 
his professorial duties, his connexion with Blackwood's 
Magazine was resumed, and his biographer truly remarks 
that probably no periodical was ever more indebted to 
one individual than was ^ Maga ' to Christopher North. 



JOHN WILSON 33 

And, in passing, it may be stated that this name, which 
had at first been assumed by various of the contributors, 
was soon exclusively associated with himself. As to the 
number, variety, and extent of his contributions, Mrs 
Gordon has furnished some curious information. During 
many years these were never fewer than on an average 
two to each number ; whilst on more than one occasion 
he produced, within the month, almost the entire contents 
of an issue. In the year 1830, he contributed in the 
month of January two articles ; in February four ; three 
in March; one each in April and May; four in June; 
three in July; seven (or 116 pages) in August; one in 
September ; two in October ; and one each in November 
and December — being thirty articles, or one thousand two 
hundred columns in the year. (Against this, however, 
there must be set off his extremely liberal quotations 
from books under review.) The subjects dealt with in 
the month of August were the following : — * The Great 
Moray Floods ' ; ' The Lay of the Desert ' ; ' The Wild 
Garland, and Sacred Melodies ' ; * Wild Fowl Shooting ' ; 
' Colman's Random Records ' ; ' Clark on Climate ' ; 
*Noctes, No. 51.' In the year following, by the month 
of September he had already contributed twenty articles, 
five of which were in the August number. And, finally, 
in 1833, ^^^ wrote no fewer than fifty-four articles, or 
upwards of two thousand four hundred closely-printed 
columns, on politics, and general literature ! Nor, when 
the extraordinary influence and popularity enjoyed by 
Blackwood's Magazine at that period, and the fact that 
these were mainly due to Christopher North are borne 
in mind, will these labours run any risk of being con- 
founded with those of the ordinary literary hack. At the 

c 



34 FAMOUS SCOTS 

same time it may be necessary to caution the reader 
against the oft-repeated error that Wilson was at any time 
editor of the Magazine. 

Of his habits of composition at this the most brilliant 
and prolific period of his career, his daughter furnishes 
the following account, from which it will be seen that his 
literary procedure was ordered with complete disregard to 
comfort. He was now living in a house which he had 
built for himself in Gloucester Place, which was to be his 
home for the remainder of his life. 

* The amazing rapidity with which he wrote, caused him too often 
to delay his work to the very last moment, so that he almost always 
wrote under compulsion, and every second of time was of consequence. 
Under such a mode of labour there was no hour left for relaxation. 
When regularly in for an article for Blackwood, his whole strength 
was put forth, and it may be said he struck into life what he had to 
do at a blow. He at these times began to write immediately after 
breakfast, that meal being despatched with a swiftness commensurate 
with the necessity of the case before him. He then shut himself into 
his study, with an express command that no one was to disturb him, 
and he never stirred from his writing-table until perhaps the greater 
part of a Nodes was written, or some paper of equal brilliancy and 
interest completed. The idea of breaking his labour by taking a con- 
stitutional walk never entered his thoughts for a moment. Whatever 
he had to write, even though a day or two were to keep him close at 
work, he never interrupted his pen, saving to take his night's rest, 
and a late dinner served to him in his study. The hour for that meal 
was on these occasions nine o'clock ; his dinner then consisted invari- 
ably of a boiled fowl, potatoes, and a glass of water — he allowed him- 
self no wine. After dinner he resumed his pen till midnight, when 
he retired to bed, not unfrequently to be disturbed by an early printer's 
boy.' 

His rapidly turned-out 'copy' would soon cover the 
table at which he wrote, after which the floor about his 
feet would be strewn with pages of his MS. * thick as 
autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.' Nor did he, even in 



JOHN WILSON 35 

the depth of winter, indulge in a fire in his study, or in any 
other illumination than that afforded by a tallow candle 
set in a kitchen candlestick. 

In the meantime he had not lost his love of the country 
and of country pursuits, and we hear of holidays spent at 
Innerleithen, in Ettrick Forest — where he rented Thirle- 
stane — near Langholm, where his son John was established 
in a farm, in the Highlands, and in a cruise with an * Ex- 
perimental Squadron * of the Navy, during which he was 
accommodated with a swinging cot in the cockpit of 
H.M.S. Vernon. As is the case in the lives of so many 
celebrated men, these years, though the most fruitful, 
were not the most eventful of his life, and therefore call 
for less detailed examination than those which had pre- 
ceded them. His character was formed, he was in the 
full swing of his labours, and the best key to the his- 
tory of this period is to be found in the study of the 
Noctes^ the Recreations^ and the other works which it 
produced. 

His heroic literary activity was continued down to 
1840, in which year he was attacked by a paralytic affec- 
tion of the right hand, which made writing irksome to 
him, so that for the next five years he contributed but 
two papers to the magazine. This ailment was the first 
warning he received that his wonderful constitution and 
great physical strength were subject to the universal law. 
But already the hand of death had been busy among his 
circle. In 1834 he had lost his esteemed friend Black- 
wood, in 1835 the Ettrick Shepherd had followed the 
publisher, whilst in 1837 he sustained the supreme be- 
reavement by losing his beloved and devoted wife. His 
grief on this occasion was profound and lasting, and a 



36 FAMOUS SCOTS 

touching picture of its uncontrollable outbursts in the 
presence of his class has been preserved. There, if any- 
thing occurred to renew the memory of his sorrow, he 
would pause for a moment or two in his lecture, * fling 
himself forward on the desk, bury his face in his hands, 
and while his whole frame heaved with visible emotion, 
would weep and sob like a very child/ So, in his work 
and his play, his joy and his sorrow, the whole man was 
cast in an heroic mould. And, with that singular but 
sincere, though oft misunderstood, fantasticness, which in 
imaginative natures demands the outward visible sign, as 
long as he lived he continued with scrupulous care the 
habit of wearing white cambric weepers on the sleeves of 
his coat or gown, out of respect for the memory of his 
faithful partner. 

The shadows were already falling thick about the lion- 
like head of the old Professor, and we have now to 
acknowledge that between his last years and the rest of 
his life there exists a discrepancy as regrettable as it is 
unexpected. The highest of animal spirits had been his 
through the brilliant promise of youth and the happy ac- 
tivity and domesticity of maturity, and when we remember 
his robust constitution and mellow philosophy, we natur- 
ally look forward to see him enjoy a green and peaceful 
old age. But such prognostications are apt to be fal- 
lacious, and the fact stands that his old age was a melan- 
choly one. Nor was its melancholy of that kind, by no 
means incompatible with a large measure of serenity, 
which is directly traceable to evils common to all men 
whose years are prolonged ; it was a peculiar despondency, 
profound and unexplained. Indeed the last pages of the 



JOHN WILSON 37 

Life are sad reading, and we pass hastily over them to 
the end. 

The first symptom of the alteration in his character 
of which we hear is his sense of loneliness. There 
was no occasion for him to be lonely, for he was rich in 
affectionate children and grand-children, yet in spite of 
these his habits insensibly became solitary, he grew to 
dislike being intruded upon, and at last was seldom seen 
in public. Still for a time his broad-brimmed hat with 
its deep crape band, his flowing locks, and his stately 
figure buttoned in its black coat, continued to be welcome 
sights in the streets of Edinburgh, and still he continued, 
without intermission, his labours among his class, until, in 
the winter of 1850, an alarming seizure which occurred 
in his retiring-room at the University compelled him to 
absent himself from his duties. In the following year he 
finally retired from the Professorship, which he had held 
for thirty years, his services being recognized by Govern- 
ment with a pension of ;^3oo a year. 

He now felt that his usefulness in life was over, 
and from henceforth his despondency deepened. We 
read that * something of a settled melancholy rested on 
his spirit, and for days he would scarcely utter a word or 
allow a smile to lighten up his face;' and, again, that 
* long and mournful meditation took possession of him ; 
days of silence revealed the depth of his suffering, and it 
was only by fits and starts that anything like composure 
visited his heart.' He himself speaks of his * hopeless 
misery.' * Nothing,' he said to his daughter, * can give 
you an idea of how utterly wretched I am ; my mind is 
going, I feel it.' And, indeed, it seems that a gradual 



38 FAMOUS SCOTS 

mental decline had set in. But he was spared its pro- 
gress. On the I St April 1854, at his house in Gloucester 
Place, he was attacked by paralysis, and there two days 
later, mourned by an almost patriarchal family of descen- 
dants, he breathed his last. 

In the details of his daily life, Wilson was accustomed 
to follow his own inclinations more than 'tis given to most 
men to do, his robust individuality disdaining the minor 
fashions and conventions of the day, whilst his native 
independence, and still more his love of home, made him 
completely indifferent to what is known as social success. 
It is not in the * great world,' therefore, that we must seek 
for the traits which characterize him. But a man is what 
he is at home, and within his own sphere Wilson's sym- 
pathies were of the widest and deepest. He was adored 
by every member of his large family, whilst his own large- 
hearted affection embraced all, down to — or, as perhaps 
I should say, remembering his special love for young 
children, up to the youngest babe in the household. 
Such anecdotes, too, as those told by his daughter of his 
generous treatment of his defaulting uncle, of his rela- 
tions with his superannuated henchman, Billy Balmer, or 
of his sitting up all night at the bedside of an old female 
servant who was dying, * arranging with gentle but awk- 
ward hand the pillow beneath her head,' or cheering her 
with encouraging words, — these speak more for the 
genuine humanity of the man than a thousand triumphs 
gained in an artificial world. 

He also shared with Sir Walter Scott the love of birds 
and animals of all kinds, from the dog, Rover — one of 
many dogs — who, crawling upstairs in its last moments, 
died with its paw in its master's hand, to the sparrow 



JOHN WILSON 39 

which inhabited his study for eleven years, and which, 
boldly perching on his shoulder, would sometimes carry 
off a hair from his shaggy head to build its nest. In 
these matters animals have an instinct which rarely mis- 
leads them, and that they had good grounds for recogniz- 
ing a friend in the Professor is proved by the following in- 
cident. One afternoon Wilson, then far advanced in life, 
was observed remonstrating with a carter who was driving 
an overladen horse through the streets of Edinburgh — 

' The carter, exasperated at this interference, took up his whip in 
a threatening way, as if with intent to strike the Professor. In an 
instant that well-nerved hand twisted it from the coarse fist of the 
man, as if it had been a straw, and walking quietly up to the cart he 
unfastened its trains^ and hurled the whole weight of coals into the 
street. The rapidity with which this was done left the driver of the 
cart speechless. Meanwhile, poor Rosinante, freed from his burden, 
crept slowly away, and the Professor, still clutching the whip in one 
hand, and leading the horse in the other, proceeded through Moray 
Place to deposit the wretched animal in better keeping than that of 
his driver. ' 

* This little episode,' adds the writer, ' is delightfully charac- 
teristic of his impulsive nature, and the benevolence of 
his heart.' 

Whilst human nature remains what it is, traits of such 
broad and genial humanity as this are never out of date ; 
but when we turn from the writer to the writings, it is to 
find the case altered, and ourselves brought face to face 
with the devastations of time. In the sense of great and 
immediate effect produced by his work, Wilson was 
unquestionably the most brilliant, as — excepting the too- 
fertile Gait — he was the most prolific, of the group of 
distinguished authors who are here associated with the 
publishing-house of Blackwood ; yet in vitality, in endur- 
ing freshness, such a novel as The Inheritance^ such a 



40 FAMOUS SCOTS 

sea-piece as Tom Cringle's Log^ not to speak of such 
a character-study as The Provost, to-day leaves his work 
far behind. Of course this is in large measure due 
to the nature, not to the defects, of that work. North's 
most distinctive writings were not creative, and in 
general it is only creative work that lives. The critic's 
reputation is transitory; Time's revenge deals swiftly, 
hardly by it; it has none of the phoenix-property of 
the creator's. Of all our distinguished critical reputa- 
tions of the last hundred years or so, how many now 
survive? To-day the critic Johnson is remembered 
chiefly for blindness, the critic Jeffrey for overweening 
self-confidence when he was wrong, the critic Macaulay 
for idle rhetoric and for consistent failure to strike the 
mark. The appreciator Lamb is almost alone in holding 
his own. And there is not one reader in a thousand who 
has time, or cares, for the purely historical task of looking 
closer, of studying these eminent writers in relation to the 
age in which they lived, and of estimating accordingly 
the services which they performed. Christopher North, 
in so far as he was a critic, has not escaped the common 
doom. Scattered over the pages of the Nodes, there are 
no doubt some shrewd and pregnant observations upon 
writers and upon literature. But these sparse grains of 
salt are not enough to preserve the general fabric from 
decay; whilst the more numerous errors of judgment in 
which his work abounds require no pointing out. As a 
reviewer North was not lacking in discrimination, as may 
be seen in the historical though generally misconceived 
essay on Tennyson; and, granted a really good opportunity 
— as in the case of that completion of Christabel which 
w^s to Martin Tupper the pastime of some idle days — no 



JOHN WILSON 41 

man knew better how to avail himself of it. The pages 
signed by him also afford abundant evidence of the 
gentleness, generosity, and enthusiasm of his spirit. But 
when so much has been said, what remains to be added ? 
Of stimulus to the reader, of conspicuous insight into the 
subject discussed, we find but little. 

Turning to the essays, collected under the title of 
* Recreations of Christopher North,' we sometimes see the 
author to better advantage, as, for instance, when he 
dons his * Sporting Jacket,' and recounts in mock-heroic 
style the Sportsman's Progress. The subject was one 
which keenly appealed to him, rousing all the enthusiasm 
of his perfervid nature, and some very bright and charac- 
teristic pages are the result. 

His hero is fishing, and has hooked a fish. 

* But the salmon has grown sulky, and must be made to spring to 
the plunging stone. There, suddenly, instinct with new passion, she 
shoots out of the foam like a bar of silver bullion ; and, relapsing into 
the flood, is in another moment at the very head of the waterfall ! 
Give her the butt — give her the butt — or she is gone for ever with the 
thunder into ten fathom deep ! — Now comes the trial of your tackle — 
and when was Phin ever known to fail at the edge of cliff or cataract ? 
Her snout is southwards — right up the middle of the main current of 
the hill-born river, as if she would seek its very source where she was 
spawned! She still swims swift, and strong, and deep — and the line 
goes steady, boys, steady — stiff and steady as a Tory in the roar of 
Opposition. There is yet an hour's play in her dorsal fin — danger 
in the flap of her tail — and yet may her silver shoulder shatter the 
gut against a rock. Why, the river was yesterday in spate, and she 
is fresh run from the sea. All the lesser waterfalls are now level 
with the flood, and she meets with no impediment or obstruction — 
the coast is clear — no tree-roots here — no floating branches — for 
during the night they have all been swept down to the salt loch. 
In medio tuHssimus ibis — ay, now you feel she begins to fail — the 
butt tells now every time you deliver your right. What ! another 
mad leap ! yet another sullen plunge ! She seems absolutely to have 



42 FAMOUS SCOTS 

discovered, or rather to be an impersonation of, the Perpetual 
Motion. Stand back out of the way, you son of a sea-cook ! — you 
in the tattered blue breeches, with the tail of your shirt hanging out. 
Who the devil sent you all here, ye vagabonds ? — Ha ! Watty Ritchie, 
my man, is that you ? God bless your honest laughing phiz ! What, 
Watty, would you think of a Fish like that about Peebles? Tarn 
Grieve never gruppit sae heavy a ane since first he belanged to the 
Council. — Curse that collie! Ay! well done, Watty! Stone him 
to Stobbo. Confound these stirks — if that white one, with caving 
horns, kicking heels, and straight-up tail, come bellowing by between 
us and the river, then ** Madam! all is lost, except honour!" If 
we lose this Fish at six o'clock, then suicide at seven. Our will is 
made— ten thousand to the Foundling — ditto to the Thames Tunnel 

ha — ha — my Beauty ! Methinks we could fain and fond kiss 

thy silver side, languidly lying afloat on the foam as if all further 
resistance now were vain, and gracefully thou wert surrendering 
thyself to death ! No faith in female — she trusts to the last trial 
of her tail — sweetly workest thou, O Reel of Reels ! and on thy 
smooth axle spinning sleep'st, even, as Milton describes her, like 
our own worthy planet. Scrope — Bainbridge — Maule — princes among 
Anglers — oh ! that you were here ! Where the devil is Sir Hum- 
phrey ? At his retort ? By mysterious sympathy — far off at his own 
Trows, the Kerss feels that we are killing the noblest Fish whose 
back ever rippled the surface of deep or shallow in the Tweed. 
Tom Purdy stands like a seer, entranced in glorious vision, beside 
turreted Abbotsford. Shade of Sandy Govan ! Alas ! alas ! Poor 
Sandy — why on thy pale face that melancholy smile ! — Peter I The 
Gaff ! The Gaff ! Into the eddy she sails, sick and slow, and almost 
with a swirl — whitening as she nears the sand — there she has it — 
struck right into the shoulder, fairer than that of Juno, Diana, 
Minerva, or Venus — and lies at last in all her glorious length and 
breadth of beaming beauty, fit prey for giant or demigod angling 
before the Flood ! ' 

Nor are his pictures of Coursing and of Fox-Hunting 
less good. But anon his overladen style crops out again, 
as in this passage, where he has just discharged his gun 
into the midst of a flock of wild-duck afloat upon a loch : — 

* Now is the time for the snow-white, here and there ebon-spotted 
Fro — who with burning eyes has Iain couched like a spaniel, his cjuick 



JOHN WILSON 43 

breath ever and anon trembling on a passionate whine, to bounce up, 
as if discharged by a catapulta, and first with immense and enormous 
high-and-far leaps, and then, fleet as any greyhound, with a breast- 
brushing brattle down the brae, to dash, all-fours, like a flying squirrel 
fearlessly from his tree, many yards into the bay with one splashing 
and momentarily disappearing spang, and then, head and shoulders 
and broad line of back and rudder tail, all elevated above or level 
with the wavy water-Hne, to mouth first that murdered mawsey of a 
mallard, lying as still as if she had been dead for years, with her 
round, fat, brown bosom towards heaven — then that old Drake, in a 
somewhat similar posture, but in more gorgeous apparel, his belly 
being of a pale grey, and his back delicately pencilled and crossed 
with numberless waved dusky lines — precious prize to one skilled 
like us in the angling art — next — nobly done, glorious Fro — that 
cream-colour-crowned widgeon, with bright rufus chestnut breast, 
separated from the neck by loveliest waved ash-brown and white 
lines, while our mind's eye feasteth on the indescribable and change- 
able green beauty-spot of his wings — and now, if we mistake not, a 
Golden Eye, best described by his name — finally, that exquisite little 
duck the Teal ; yes, poetical in its delicately pencilled spots as an 
Indian shell, and when kept to an hour, roasted to a minute, gravied 
in its own wild richness, with some few other means and appliances 
to boot, carved finely — most finely — by razor-like knife, in a hand 
skilful to dissect and cunning to divide — tasted by a tongue and 
palate both healthily pure as the dewy petal of a morning rose — 
swallowed by a gullet felt gradually to be extending itself in its 
intense delight — and received into a stomach yawning with greed and 
gratitude, — Oh ! surely the thrice-blessed of all web-footed birds ; 
the apex of Apician luxury ; and able, were anything on the face of 
this feeble earth able, to detain a soul, on the very brink of fate, a 
short quarter of an hour from an inferior Elysium ! ' 

In point of style could anything well be much worse ? 
Even the far-famed Nodes Ambrosiancs, by much the most 
celebrated of Wilson's writings, though they may still be 
dipped into with pleasure, will scarcely stand critical exam- 
ination nowadays. Of course, from their very nature, they 
have come to labour under the disadvantage of being largely 
concerned with topics and persons of long since exhausted 



44 FAMOUS SCOTS 

interest. And, again, their convivial setting, which pleased 
in its own day, is now probably by many looked upon 
askance, and that, it must be confessed, not without some 
show of excuse. If this were all, it would be well. iVs 
we have seen, Wilson wrote his dialogues hastily and pre- 
sumably wrote them for the moment, so that to judge them 
as permanent contributions to literature is to judge them 
by a standard contemplated not by the author, but by his 
injudicious critics. Amongst these, Professor Ferrier, in 
his introductory critique to the authoritative edition of 
the Noctes^ published forty years ago, most confidently 
claims that they possess solid and lascing qualities, and 
in the front rank of these qualities he places humour and 
dramatic power. Now to us, except in outward form, the 
Nodes appear almost anything rather than dramatic ; they 
are even less dramatic than the conversation-pieces of 
Thomas Love Peacock. It is true that of the two principal 
talkers one speaks Scotch and the other EngUsh ; but in 
every other respect they might exchange almost any of 
their longest and most important speeches without the 
smallest loss to characterisation. The same authority (I 
use the word in a purely empirical sense) enthusiastically 
lauds the creation of The Shepherd ; and upon him it is 
true that, by dint of insistence on two or three superficial 
mannerisms, a certain shadowy individuality has been con- 
ferred. But surely it is needless to point out that a label 
is not a personality, and that this sort of thing is something 
quite apart from dramatic creation. The critic then goes 
on to say that * in wisdom the Shepherd equals the Socrates 
of Plato \ in humour he surpasses the Falstafif of Shake- 
speare.' The last part of the sentence strikes us as even 
more surprising than the first, for had our opinion of the 



JOHN WILSON 45 

imaginary revellers at Ambrose's been asked we should 
have had to confess that, though they possess high spirits 
in abundance and a certain sense of the ludicrous, of 
humour in the true sense — of the humour, I won't say 
of a Sterne, but of a Michael Scott — all are alike entirely 
destitute. And one may even add that with persons of 
equally high spirits such is almost always the case. Well 
then, it may be asked, if they lack both humour and 
dramatic power, in what qualities, pray, do these world- 
famed dialogues excel ? The answer is, of course, that in 
brilliant intellectual and rhetorical display the A^^/^^ are 
supreme. Yet here, also, there is often about them some- 
thing too much of deliberate and self-conscious fine- 
writing. And yet, even to-day, when tastes have changed 
and fashions altered, the exuberance of their eloquence is 
hard to withstand, and in reading them we sometimes 
almost believe that we are touched when in reality we are 
merely dazzled. This dazzling quality is not one of the 
highest in literature : with the single possible exception of 
Victor Hugo, the greatest writers have always been without 
it. But it pervades, floods, overwhelms the Nocks, It is 
a somewhat barren, and unendearing quality at best ; yet, 
after all, it is an undoubted manifestation of intellectual 
power ; and whatever it may be worth, let us give Wilson 
full credit for having excelled in it. 

One last word. The literary workman has no more 
unpleasing task to perform than that of so-called de- 
structive criticism ; but if Wilson himself, as apart from 
his writings, be indeed, as we believe him to be, an im- 
mortal figure, by releasing him from the burden of ill- 
judged praise which like a mill-stone hangs about his neck, 
and by setting him in his true light, we shall have done 



46 FAMOUS SCOTS 

him no disservice. On the poetic imagination, then, he 
looms as one heroically proportioned; whilst more practical 
thinkers will cherish his memory as that of a most brilliant 
contributor to the periodical literature of his day, a great 
inspirer of youth, and a standard and pattern to his 
countrymen of physical and intellectual manhood. 



JOHN GALT 

Through life the subject of this sketch was unfortunate ; 
nor has posthumous justice redressed the balance in his 
favour. His fellow-countrymen and fellow-craftsmen, Scott 
and Smollett — with whom, if below them, he is not un- 
worthy to be mentioned — have long since been accorded 
high rank among the great novelists of English literature : 
Gait remains in obscurity. And yet it is easy to under- 
stand how his qualities have failed of recognition. For 
though his character was in the ordinary sense of the 
word exemplary, his genius extraordinary, yet in either 
there was something lacking. Indeed the study of his 
life and works reveals almost as much to be blamed as 
to be praised. 

John Gait was born at Irvine, in Ayrshire, on the 2nd 
May, 1779, in that humbler station of society, which — in 
so far as it dispenses with screens and concealments, and 
so brings a child the sooner face to face with life as it is 
— may be considered favourable to genius. In childhood 
he was of infirm constitution and somewhat effeminate 
disposition — defects which were, however, in due course 
amply rectified. At this time his passion for flowers and 
for music gave evidence of a sensibility which, if one is 
loth to condemn it as unwholesome, is at least of doubtful 

47 



48 FAMOUS SCOTS 

augury for happiness in a workaday world. To these affec- 
tions he joined the love of ballads and story-books — in 
the midst of which he would often pass the day in loung- 
ing upon his bed. Nor did oral tradition fail him ; for, 
frequenting the society of the indigent old women of the 
locality, from their lips he would drink in to his heart's 
content that lore of a departing age which he afterwards 
turned to such good account in his works. To his own 
mother, whom nature had gifted with remarkable mental 
powers, and in particular with a strong sense of humour 
and a faculty of original expression, his debt was admitted 
to be great. Not unnaturally Mrs Gait at first strenuously 
opposed her son's bookish propensities, though it is re- 
corded that she lived to regret having done so. The 
father, who by profession was master of a West India- 
man, though, in his son's words, 'one of the best as he 
was one of the handsomest of men,' does not appear 
in mind and force of character to have risen above 
mediocrity. 

The most striking incident in the childhood of the 
future novelist is his association with the * Buchanites,' a 
religious sect who took their name from a demented 
female, Mrs Buchan. It happened that this person had 
been much impressed by the preaching of Mr White, the 
Relief Minister of Irvine, and had followed him from 
Glasgow to that place, where some weak-headed members 
of the congregation mistook her ravings for inspira.tion, 
and made her warmly welcome. White himself partici- 
pated in their delusion, and when authoritatively required 
to dismiss his adherent, chose rather to resign his church. 
From this time meetings would be held in a tent, gene- 
rally in the night time, and there Mrs Buchan would hold 



JOHN GALT 49 

forth, announcing herself to be the woman spoken of in 
the twelfth chapter of the Revelations, and Mr White 
as the man-child whom she had brought forth. The 
proceedings attracted public attention, rioting followed, 
and it was found advisable to expel the evangelists from 
the town. Some forty or fifty disciples accompanied 
their exodus, who sang as they went, and declared 
themselves en route for the New Jerusalem, and in the 
company of the crack-brained enthusiasts went the infant 
Gait, his imagination captivated by the strangeness of 
their doings. He had not proceeded far, however, 
ere that sensible woman, his mother, pounced upon him 
and bore him off home. Nevertheless the wild psalmody 
of the occasion abode in his memory, and when in later 
life, in his fine novel of Ringan Gilhaize^ he came to 
describe the Covenanters, the recollection stood him in 
good stead. It is also recorded of him that, after read- 
ing Pope's Iliad, he was so deeply impressed by the 
book as to kneel then and there, and humbly and 
fervently pray that it might be vouchsafed to him to 
accomplish something equally great. It must not be 
thought, however, that in him imagination predominated 
to the exclusion of everything else. On the contrary, to 
the love of what was beautiful or strange, he united a 
pronounced mechanical and engineering turn, which led 
him, among other undertakings, to construct an ^olian 
harp, and to devise schemes for improving the water- 
supply of Greenock, the town to which his family had in 
the meantime removed. Thus was first manifested that 
diversity of faculty which enabled him in later life with 
equal ease to pourtray men and manners and to found 
cities and subdue wastes. 

D 



so FAMOUS SCOTS 

Meantime his education, which had been begun at 
home and continued at the grammar-school of Irvine, was 
carried on at Greenock, where it was supplemented with 
advantage by independent reading in a well-chosen public 
library. In Greenock, also, where he spent some fifteen 
years, he was fortunate in having as associates a group of 
young men whom the spirit of intellectual emulation 
characterised, and of whom more than one was destined 
to attain distinction. Among these were Eckford, who is 
referred to as the future architect and builder of the 
United States' Navy, and Spence, afterwards the author 
of a treatise on Logarithmic Transcendents. But un- 
doubtedly young Gait's most congenial companion was 
one James Park, a youth of elegant and scholarly tastes, 
who shared in his passion for the belles-lettres^ and criti- 
cised in a friendly spirit the attempts which he was now 
beginning to make as a poet. Would that this young 
man's influence had been exerted to greater effect, for he 
seems to have been just the sort of mentor of whom Gait 
stood in need, and w^hose discipline throughout life he 
missed ! * He seemed,' says the Autobiography^ ' to con- 
sider excellence in literature as of a more sacred nature 
than ever I did, who looked upon it but as a means of 
influence.' A means of influence ! One would gladly 
believe this but the querulous insincere utterance of a dis- 
appointed man. Unhappily evidence is but too abundant 
that Gait was consistently lacking in the respect due to 
his high calling. Among his earliest poetical efforts was a 
tragedy on the life of Mary Queen of Scots, and in course 
of time he began to contribute to the local newspaper and 
to the Scots Magazine, With Park and other young men 
he also joined in essay and debating societies, a recrea- 



JOHN GALT 51 

tion which they varied by walking-tours to Edinburgh, 
Loch Lomond, the Border Counties, and elsewhere. 
Before this time he had been placed in the Custom 
House at Greenock, to acquire some training as a clerk, 
whence in due course he was transferred to work in a 
mercantile office. It was the period of the resumption of 
the war with France, and he took a leading part in the 
movement for forming local companies of volunteer 
riflemen. 

This period of his adolescence strikes one as having 
been unusually prolonged. It came to a sudden and 
violent end. It appears that about this time a set of 
purse-proud upstarts, who stood much in need of school- 
ing in more ways than one, had made their appearance in 
Glasgow. In relation to some matter of business, one of 
these had addressed an insolent letter to the firm with 
which Gait was connected. It was delivered into his 
hands. On discovering its contents his indignation was 
boundless, and he proceeded to action with all the im- 
petuosity of a Hotspur. Missing the writer in Glasgow, 
he straightway tracked him to his quarters in Edinburgh, 
and having bolted the door of the room in which he 
sat, forced from him a written apology. So much was 
satisfactory ; but the turmoil excited in the young man's 
brain did not subside immediately. He did not return 
to his employment, but, after spending some time in 
an indeterminate sort of fashion, set off for London * to 
look about him.' In the Autobiography^ written when he 
was old and an invalid, all this is detailed in a loose and 
cursory manner. There is no reference to emotion or 
the inner life, and the style is that of one who, having 
written many books, is grown very tired of writing. To 



52 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the reader this is the reverse of stimulating ; yet whatever 
may be stated and whatever kept back, we may feel sure 
that, in so emotional and imaginative a man, an intense 
inner life must have existed, and one in all probability 
not of the smoothest. At the time of leaving home, how- 
ever, the writer acknowledges to having felt exceedingly 
depressed. Then follows a description of sensations ex- 
perienced, whilst horses were being changed, on the road 
between Greenock and Glasgow. His father accompanied 
him on his journey. 

*I walked back on the fields,' says the young man, 'alone, 
with no buoyant heart. The view towards Argyleshire, 
from the brow of the hill, is perhaps one of the most 
picturesque in the world. I have since seen some of the 
finest scenes, but none superior. At the time it seemed 
as if some pensive influence rested on the mountains, and 
silently allured me back; and this feeling was superstitiously 
augmented by my happening in the same moment to turn 
round and behold the eastern sky, which lay in the direc- 
tion of my journey, sullenly overcast. On returning to 
the inn, the horses had been some time in harness, and 
my father was a little impatient at my absence, but con- 
jecturing what was passing in my mind, said little ; nor 
did we speak much to each other till the waiter of the inn 
opened the door for us to alight at Glasgow. In truth 
I was not blind to the perils which awaited me, but my 
obstinacy was too indulgently considered.' The above 
reads like a passage from The Omen, In it we see the 
true Gait, or at least one side of him — brooding, fantastic, 
the devotee of mysticism, discerning, at this momentous 
point in his career, the finger of fate where another would 
have seen but an ordinary process of nature ! 



JOHN GALT 53 

As to the time he now spent in London, beyond an 
incidental admission that it was one of the least satis- 
factory periods of his career, Gait does not take us into 
his confidence. One guesses that had he consulted his 
own feelings only, he would have enjoyed the luxury of 
writing Confessions. But, after all, he was a Scotchman, 
though an unusual variety of the class, and Scotchmen do 
not indulge in luxuries of that kind. His Autobiography, 
when it came to be written, was in the main a piece of 
book-making ; certainly it has nothing of the confessional 
character, and, indeed, what of self-revelation he at this 
time supplies must be sought in his letters to Park. 

He had brought with him to the metropolis a goodly 
number of introductions, which procured him much 
civility but nothing more. Whilst waiting, however, to 
see what was to be done for him in the shape of prac- 
tical assistance, he employed himself in preparing for the 
press a poem which had been inspired by his studies 
in antiquarianism, and written some time earlier. The 
title of this production was The Battle of Largs, and its 
theme the invasion of Scotland by Haco, King of Norway, 
in the year 1263, — a subject which had already prompted 
the Titanic suggestions of Lady Wardlaw's Hardyknute, 
The poem, as it survives in extracts, is turgid, crude, and 
immature, exhibiting the exact reverse of what is desirable 
in poetry — to wit, a great expenditure of means to pro- 
duce a very small result. For 'tis in vain we are assured 
that desperate deeds are doing if we find it possible to 
remain completely unmoved. A strain of somewhat 
similar kind was afterwards taken up by Motherwell, 
and by Tom Stoddart in the unbridled fantasy of his 
only half-serious * Necromaunt,' called The Death- Wake. 



54 FAMOUS SCOTS 

To do Gait justice, he quickly realised that he had 
mounted the wrong Pegasus, and almost immediately 
suppressed his poem. He acted wisely, and here once 
for all it may be admitted that, in the specialised sense 
of the term, he was no poet. Fancy, imagination, 
dramatic power, and many another fine attribute of the 
poet he of course possessed in high degree, but, 
whether because lacking the * accomplishment of verse,* 
or for some other reason, he failed to give expression 
to these gifts in poetry. Metre seems to have impeded 
rather than assisted him, and he is most poetic when 
WTiting in prose — a conclusion suggested by the poem 
now under consideration, and borne out by his Star 
of Destiny^ his posthumous Demon of Destiny^ and his 
poetic plays. From his own frank avowal that, when 
drawing up a list of his works for publication, an epic* 
was overlooked, we judge that not much of the labour of 
the file was expended upon his verse. 

He waited for some months in London, whiling away 
the time, as he pretends, by dabbling in astrology, 
alchemy, and other studies which served to feed his 
love of the occult, and then at last, in despair, decided 
to shift for himself. This led to his entering into partner- 
ship with a young Scotchman named M'^Lachlan, in a 
business which, for reasons unknown, is mentioned only 
under the vague name of a * commercial enterprise.* 
Whatever may have been its nature, for Gait this under- 
taking started badly, and after a period of better 
success, at the end of three years ended in bankruptcy. 
The precise steps by which this final consummation 
was reached are carefully detailed by Gait, yet to 

* The Crusade, 



JOHN GALT 55 

minds unversed in commercial procedure they remain 
very far from clear. In general terms, however, we 
gather that the failure was due to the dishonesty of 
a debtor, occurring in conjunction with a succession of 
financial misfortunes. 

Having failed in commerce, Gait's next thought was of 
the Law. He entered himself of Lincoln's Inn, and whilst 
waiting to be formally called to the Bar, went abroad in 
the hope of improving his health, which was not good at 
the time. He tells us that by this time he had realised 
that, without friends, there is no such thing as * getting 
on ' in life possible. These he was conscious of lacking, 
and when he now turned his back on England it was, in 
his own words, half desiring that no event might occur to 
make him ever wish to return. He betook himself in the 
first instance to Gibraltar, where, in the well-known Gar- 
rison Library, he had his first glimpse of a young man 
whose feelings, had they been revealed, might have been 
found to tally strangely with his own. Lord Byron, at 
that time known only as the author of a mordant satire, 
was starting upon the tour which was so soon to make 
him famous, and as Gait had him and Hobhouse for 
fellow-travellers to Malta and Sicily, he got to know them 
fairly well. It is noticeable that his first impressions of 
the Pilgrim betray prejudice; and that long afterwards, 
when he was called on to be his biographer, he complains 
that Moore's portrait reveals only the sunny side of his 
lordship's character, and is 'too radiant and conciliatory.' 

After visiting Malta and Sicily, Gait proceeded to 
Athens. His active mind, abhorring idleness, was sooa 
at work again. It may be remembered that this was the 
period of Buonaparte's endeavour to enforce his nefarious 



56 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Berlin and Milan Decrees, which had been designed with 
the object of annihilating British commerce. Our traveller 
now conceived the idea that they might be evaded by in- 
troducing British goods into the Continent through Turkey. 
And here it may be noted that his biographers have united 
in representing this scheme as the object of his going 
abroad, whereas he himself distinctly, though incidentally, 
states that he left England for the benefit of his health,"^ 
and that his scheme first occurred to him when at Tripo- 
lizza.t This fact, immaterial in itself, is of importance as 
affording evidence that his circumstances at the time were 
fairly easy ; for his travels must have been costly, yet they 
do not appear to have brought him in any return until 
after his written account of them had been published, 
when he was recouped for the whole, or a part, of his 
outlay. 

In pursuance of the newly-devised scheme, it was now 
his object to find a locality where a depot of goods might 
be established. For this purpose, after visiting various 
out of the way places, he selected Mykoni, an island of 
the Archipelago, which possessed an excellent harbour, 
where he acquired a large building, suited for a store- 
house, which had originally been erected by Orloff at a 
time when the Empress Catherine the Second had designs 
on these islands. Hence, in the summer of 1810, he 
returned to Malta, to make known and to develope his 
scheme, and whilst awaiting the result of communications 
with England, he filled up the time with further travels, 
visiting Constantinople and Widdin. Turkey was now in 
arms against Russia, and in the course of his present 
journey, which was performed in wintry weather, he saw 

* Lite7'ary Life^ p. 79. f Autobiography^ vol. i., p, 147, 



JOHN GALT 57 

something of the hardships as well as of the pomp of 
war. Without presuming to question that he kept busi- 
ness in view — as possibly also did George Borrow in his 
rambles in Spain — we note the fact that in his own 
account of his travels the details of his specific labours are 
kept well in the background, if not indeed out of sight. 
At the worst his journeys, which led him through some 
singularly wild and little known parts of the globe, by 
bringing him acquainted with many picturesque and un- 
usual characters, must have been rich in suggestions of 
adventure and romance; and, indeed, there is evidence 
that some of his experience of primitive and martial life 
acquired at this time was afterwards turned to account in 
painting similar life at home for his historical novels. 
His expectations of patronage for his project were, 
however, disappointed, and he resolved to return with- 
out delay to England, in the hope of there finding 
support for it. In the meantime literature had not been 
entirely neglected. Keeping his eyes well about him, he 
had amassed the notes on which were subsequently based 
his VoyageSj and Letters fro77i the Levant) whilst a trans- 
lation from Goldoni, executed in a single wet day at 
Missolonghi, and pubUshed in the * New British Theatre ' 
as The Word of Honour^ together with the tragedy of 
Maddalen^ composed whilst undergoing quarantine at 
Messina, belong also to this time. 

Back in London, he had the mortification of finding 
his commercial scheme — as to the presumptive value of 
which one would wish to have specialist opinion — regarded 
coldly by the Foreign Office, whilst at the same time he 
seems to have satisfied himself of the inutility of proceed- 
ing further in his legal career. But, whatever may have 



58 FAMOUS SCOTS 

been his defects, want of resourcefulness was certainly not 
among them. An outburst of literary industry followed, 
and the year 1812 saw the publication of his Voyages and 
Travels, his Life of Wolsey, and his Tragedies. But in 
justice to one who has sins enough of slipshod composi- 
tion to answer for, it must be stated that most of the Life 
of Wolsey — one of the most carefully composed of his 
books — had been written at an earlier date. 

Of his Voyages and Travels in the years 1809, 18 10, 
and 181 1, containing statistical^ commercial^ and miscel- 
laneous observations on Gibraltar^ Sardinia^ Sicily^ Malta ^ 
Cerigo and Turkey^ a competent critic remarks that, 
'while containing some interesting matter, they are dis- 
figured by grave faults of style and by rash judgments.' 
The public received them favourably, but a contemptuous 
notice in the Quarterly Review was warmly resented by the 
author. 

It was whilst standing in the quadrangle of Christchurch 
College, when on a visit to Oxford, that Gait had con- 
ceived the idea of his Life of Wolsey, He had worked 
hard at the book before he went abroad, and he claimed 
that it embodied new views, and the results of much 
original research. Notwithstanding this, the Quarterly 
Review assailed him again, and this time so libellously as 
to lead him to think of a criminal prosecution. He, 
however, dropped the idea, with the result that when his 
Tragedies saw the light, the persecution — now as in the 
case of the Travels conducted by Croker in person — was 
renewed with additional pungency. In the general form 
of his Maddalen^ Agamemnon^ Lady Macbeth^ Antofiia^ and 
Clytemnestra^ the author followed Alfieri, whose works he 
had studied abroad and admired enthusiastically, though 



JOHN GALT 59 

with reservations. The plays are of a tentative char- 
acter, and certainly do not deserve Scott's condemnation 
as the * worst ever seen/ Lady Macbeth^ which the 
author thought the ' best or the worst ' of the series, 
though not lacking in imaginative touches, is without 
progression or story, and besides provoking irresistible 
comparisons, fails by ending just where it began. And 
whilst on the subject of Gait's drama, we may mention 
The Witness^ the most important of several plays con- 
tributed by him to the * New British Theatre,' a 
publication undertaken by Colbourn at his instigation. 
Here the dramatist had a powerfully dramatic if also a 
somewhat inconsequent story to work upon — a subject, in 
fact, after his own heart. Unfortunately the execution 
of the piece is hasty, and by no means equal to its 
conception. It was performed for some nights in 
Edinburgh as The Appeal^ when Scott wrote an Epilogue 
for it, said to be the only piece of humorous verse 
existing from his pen. Gait himself rehandled the subject 
in narrative form, under the title of The Unguarded Hour, 
He now embarked on a journalistic enterprise, as- 
suming for a time the editorship of the Political Review, 
But the work did not suit him. After about a month he 
began to tire of it, and it was soon abandoned. He also 
contributed lives of Hawke, Byron, and Rodney, to an 
edition of Campbell's Lives of the Admirals ; whilst, in 
1813, his Letters from the Levantms.de their appearance. 
These contain * views of the state of society, manners, 
opinions, and commerce, in Greece and several of the 
principal islands of the Archipelago,' and had actually 
been written as letters at the places from which they are 
dated, being subsequently but little altered. 



6o FAMOUS SCOTS 

Perhaps we have already seen enough of the subject of this 
sketch to convince us that any lengthy perseverance in one 
course of conduct must not be expected of him, and, sure 
enough, the next thing we hear of him is that he is bound 
for Gibraltar, on another commercial enterprise. Before 
setting out, he had taken occasion to revisit the scenes 
of his early years, going in turn to every place which he 
remembered having frequented, even to the churchyard, 
amid whose tombstones, like his own Andrew Wylie, he 
had haunted as a boy. Taking stock of himself and his 
surroundings, he tells us that he was sensible of change 
everywhere, but nowhere more than in his own hopes. 
* I saw that a blight had settled on them, and that 
my career must in future be circumscribed and sober.' 
When it is remembered that he was now touching upon 
what is called the prime of life, his tone of disillusion is 
pathetic. 

He had gone to Gibraltar as the emissary of Kirkman 
Finlay — a Glasgow merchant, who afterwards bore a 
spirited part in the Greek War of Independence — with 
a view to ascertain the feasibility of smuggling British 
goods into Spain. But the victories of the Duke of 
Wellington in the Peninsula were unfavourable to his 
mission, and much against his will he found himself 
compelled to return to England, having accomplished 
nothing, to seek surgical treatment for a painful malady 
from which he was now suffering. Whilst in London he 
was married, his wife being the daughter of a Dr Tilloch, 
editor of the Philosophical Magazine^ to which Gait was an 
occasional contributor. His marriage was a very happy 
one, and on the principle, perhaps, that the happiest 
countries have no history, his married life is not referred 



JOHN GALT 6 1 

to in the biographies. In 1814, at the time of the 
Restoration in France, we find him visiting Holland and 
that country, with a view to promote yet another * abortive 
scheme.' 

It had now become imperative that he should exert 
himself, and having, as one may say, nothing better to 
do on his return from the Continent, he resumed the 
labours of the pen. His first known work of fiction was 
the result. It was entitled The Majolo^ founded upon a 
Sicilian superstition, and published anonymously in 181 6. 
It was a favourite with its author, and has been described 
as a * strange flighty production, enjoyed only by a few 
peculiar minds.' With it may be mentioned The Earth- 
quake^ a three-volume novel written in 1820, and founded 
on the Messina earthquake of 1783. The latter, though 
an extravagant and ill-constructed story, is said to de- 
scribe Sicilian habits and sentiments with accuracy. The 
Majolo was followed in the same year by the earlier 
instalment of a Life of Benjamin West, compiled from 
materials supplied by the painter himself — a work which 
was completed four years later, after his death. Then the 
eternal commercial scheme cropped up again. This time 
it emanated from Glasgow, leading Gait to move with his 
family to Finnart, near Greenock, where he spent a period 
afterwards characterised as the most unsatisfactory in his 
whole life. As usual the scheme in which he was 
interested failed, and he returned to London, having 
accepted employment from the Union Canal Company, in 
order to assist the passing through Parliament of a bill 
promoted by that body. This being accomplished, he 
returned to the drudgery of the desk, and, first and last, 
turned out a portentous body of hack-work, the various 



62 FAMOUS SCOTS 

items of which need not be catalogued. Fortunately for 
himself, if not always for his reader, he had the strength 
and insouciance under labour of what he physically was, a 
giant. Among the tasks performed at this time were the 
fascinating, if fabulous, Pictures from English, Scottish, 
and Irish History ; The Wandering Jeiv^ described as a 
' conglomerate of history, biography, travel, and descriptive 
geography,' and a collection of * All the Voyages round the 
World' — the last issued under the pen-name of Samuel 
Prior. 

This record of futile commercial enterprise, varied by 
uninspiring literary work, constitutes dull reading ; fortun- 
ately a happier period is now reached. In 1820, Mr 
Blackwood accepted The Ayrshire Legatees for his magazine, 
and this book proved to be Gait's first real Hterary success. 
Perhaps it is also the first deliberate attempt in our litera- 
ture to delineate, for their own sake, contemporary Scottish 
manners and character. It will be seen that the mechanism 
of the story, though of the simplest, is well contrived for 
supplying to these the necessary relief. Dr Pringle, the 
minister of a secluded rural parish in Ayrshire, having to 
his surprise been appointed residuary legatee of a wealthy 
Indian cousin deceased, betakes himself to London to 
attend to his affairs in person. He is accompanied by 
his wife and family — the latter consisting of a son just 
called to the Scottish bar, and a daughter. The Scottish 
characters are thus detached against an English back- 
ground, and the letters in which they describe their experi- 
ences in the metropolis to their several correspondents at 
home make up the staple of the book. The characters of 
this little group — of the simple, but truly pious and kind- 
hearted minister, with his sturdy presbyterianism and quaint 



JOHN GALT 63 

traditional phraseology of the pulpit ; of that notable manag- 
ing woman his spouse, like whom there was not another 
within the jurisdiction of the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr ; 
and of the really able and acute young advocate, with his 
Scottish magniloquence, and his pose as a man of the world 
even whilst betraying his inexperience — all these are well 
conceived and well drawn, their unconscious self-revelation 
being cleverly and naturally managed. The high-flown 
and romantic young lady, who so soon adapts herself to 
her new circumstances, though a pleasing enough portrait, 
is less distinctively Scottish than the rest. Fragments of 
narrative interpolated among the letters serve to introduce 
us to the audience before whom these are read out, and at 
the same time to present a second series of slighter, though 
not less racy, character-sketches. The hint of the book, 
with its unanswered correspondence, is obviously drawn 
from Humphrey Clinker^ and, as in that masterpiece, real 
persons and events — such as the funeral of George the 
Third and the trial of Queen Caroline, Braham the singer 
and Sir Francis Burdett — supply much of the epistolary 
subject-matter. As in Smollett's novel, too, the same 
subjects are at times discussed in turn by the different 
writers — a plan which, though it serves the purpose of con- 
trasting character, is not entirely free from objection. 

The Ayrshire Legatees was followed in the next year by 
the yet more original Afinals of the Parish. The history of 
the growth of this book is identical with that of Waverley 
— it had been begun years before, laid aside, and then re- 
sumed and completed — only that Gait has told us that his 
reason for discontinuing it was that he had been assured 
that a Scotch novel had no chance of success — an assur- 
ance which the case of Waverley has proved untrue. The 



64 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Annals stands in somewhat the same relation to Scott's 
novel as does a Dutch to an Italian masterpiece, a tale of 
Crabbers to an Elizabethan tragedy. It is given out as an 
account of the ministry of Micah Balwhidder, parish priest 
of Dalmailing (Dreghorn), written by himself. Mr Bal- 
whidder had happened to be inducted on the very day on 
which King George the Third came to the throne ; and, 
irrespective of its merit as a work of fiction, his narrative 
possesses real historical value as a record of the progress of 
a rural parish during the half-century succeeding that event. 
Indeed, with some omissions, the book might almost be 
printed as an appendix to the old Statistical Account of the 
parishes of Scotland, drawn up by the ministers. When 
rumours of great events — such as the American War of 
Independence or the French Revolution — reach the 
secluded hamlet, their sound is softened and their in- 
fluence subdued. But the records of such local matters 
as floods and bad seasons, improvement of land, making 
of roads and planting of hedges, development of mineral 
resources, and so on, are also in their degree the stuff of 
which history is made, and as here set down they are 
worthy the attention of an Arthur Young. Then we are 
incidentally informed of the fluctuations of prices, of the 
rise of new industries, and the change of fashions — in- 
formation which to the ordinary novel-reader would appear 
dry, but for the human and personal interest by which it 
is pervaded. For the history of the parishioners is inter- 
woven with that of the parish, and over the whole is cast 
the charm of the kindly Doric and the simple and guileless 
personality of the minister. In theory an uncompromising 
stickler for orthodoxy of doctrine, and a terror to evil-doers 
in the abstract, Mr Balwhidder's instinct is wiser than his 



JOHN GALT 65 

creed, and where the two are at variance the stronger in- 
sensibly gains the day. The tone of his fragmentary 
narrative is of itself proof sufficient of his fatherly interest 
in his villagers. And among those villagers, or at least 
within the narrow bounds of his parish, he can exhibit a 
sufficiently motley and picturesque variety in character and 
the experience of life. First of all we have Lord Eagle- 
sham, the kind landlord, genial gentleman and free liver ; 
Mr Cayenne, the irascible business-man, whose bark is 
worse than his bite, and Lady Macadam, the flighty and 
high-handed Great Lady of the old school. Then there is 
Mrs Malcolm, the pattern widow left with a large young 
family, her son Charles, the frank sailor, and her handsome 
daughter Kate; old Nanse Banks, the school-mistress, and 
her more advanced successor. Miss Sabrina Hookey ; Colin 
Mavis, the youthful poet; the labourer who deserts his 
slatternly wife and family in order to enlist ; the ' naturals,' 
Jenny Gaffaw and her fantastic ill-fated daughter; pious 
Mizy Mirkland, and many more. And if these figures be 
not drawn life-size and set direct in the reader's eye, it is 
for the sake of artistic keeping : the book is deliberately 
pitched in a lower key than the ordinary novel, and its 
persons are shown to us, as it were, afar off. But, none the 
less, every history is life-like, every character consistent 
within itself — living as with the life of those real people 
who flourished before our time, and of whom we have all 
of us heard in fireside stories as children. In this respect 
the author's aim is perfectly realised, and his work is a 
perfect work of art. 

As is the Annals to ministerial and parochial life, so is 
The Provost (published in the following year) to the life 
of magistrates and municipalities. Yet a greater contrast to 

E 



66 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the ingenuous pastor of Dalmailing than that presented 
by the long-headed Provost of the Royal Burgh of Gude- 
town it would be almost impossible to conceive. Either 
of the two, in fact, presents a happy illustration of the 
respective shares of personality and environment in the 
formation of character : each is in part God's work, in part 
the world's. But it is in the magistrate that the world has 
the larger share. Provost Pawkie, who is Gait's masterpiece 
in the delineation of character, is worldly wisdom incarnate. 
Entering public life at a period when jobbery and corrup- 
tion are rife, he simply takes the world as he finds it, and 
turns it to the best account he can. Only, as nature has 
endowed him with a sharper wit than his brother bailies 
and councillors, he is enabled to tread the paths of policy 
to much better advantage than they, whilst in the midst 
of very questionable transactions retaining the appearance 
of clean hands. A fortunate geniality of temper, which 
is partly the cause and partly the result of his prosperity, 
keeps him even at the worst from entirely forfeiting our 
regard; while, strange as it may seem, the warmth and 
lightness of his feeling in pubHc or private matters where 
his own interest is not concerned prove that his heart 
remains unperverted by the element in which he works. 
As time goes on, the public life around him becomes 
purer, and he himself keeps pace with the times. Is 
this because he has seen the error of his ways, and like 
all people who are good in the main grows better 
as he grows older; or is it merely the result of policy 
trimming his sails to catch the popular breeze ? Perhaps 
the balance of the doubt is in his favour ; yet assuredly he 
is far too clear-sighted to persevere in methods which 
have become publicly discredited. Gait's artistic instinct 



JOHN GALT 67 

was too true to allow him to make perfectly clear to us all 
the workings of so subtle a mind ; but the worthy cloth- 
mercer himself stands before us to the life, shrewd, portly, 
and consequential, with the redeeming twinkle of a dry 
Scotch humour in his eye and a racy Scotticism on his lip. 

As in the Annals of the Parish^ so in The Provost a 
chronicle of external progress forms the background to 
the narrator's experiences, and in the latter case this 
chronicle deals with improvements in the burgh, sani- 
tary enactments, paving and lighting, repairing the Tol- 
booth steeple, and so forth. These affairs, though in 
their own way typical also, are of narrower interest 
than the changes in a countryside, but their inferior- 
ity in this respect is more than made up for by 
such admirable passages of interpolated narrative as, for 
instance, those which describe the execution of Jean 
Gaisling for child-murder, the Windy Yule with its 
disasters on the sea and heart-break on land, the duel, 
and the visit of the press-gang, or, in humorous vein, 
the fracas with the strolling players in the change-house, 
and the incident of the supposed French spy. 

Few writers have possessed a greater native gift of 
story-telling than Gait, and few, it must alas! be added 
have used their gift mxOre carelessly. In the very slightest 
of his numberless tales, traces of this gift are apt to 
appear, and perhaps in none of his writings is it seen to 
greater advantage than in the incidental reminiscences 
of The Provost, But, in fact, this little book possesses 
the merit, so rare among our author's writings, of perfec- 
tion as an artistic whole. In reviewing Gait we are too 
apt to find ourselves driven to the naive conclusion of the 
man in the anecdote, *that the work would have been 



68 FAMOUS SCOTS 

better if the craftsman had taken more pains/ But in 
this case he either did take more trouble than usual, or else, 
which is more likely, his inspiration was better sustained. 

The period now under consideration may be defined 
as that of Gait's masterpieces; yet even now a slight 
decline in his workmanship begins to be manifest. In 
the same year with The Provost^ he published The Steam- 
boat^ and Sir Andrew Wylie^ thus already betraying a 
tendency to over-write. The Steamboat consists mainly 
of an account of the experiences of one Thomas Duffle, 
burgess of the Saltmarket, at the Coronation of George 
the Fourth — which is described in detail — the said 
experiences being couched in the racy autobiographical 
style already familiar to readers of The Provost^ and 
relieved by a series of short stories supposed to be 
related by Duffle's fellow-travellers. In many of these 
stories — and notably in those told by the Sailor Boy and 
the Soldier's Mother, in Deucalion of Kentucky and The 
Dumbie^s Son — Gait's powers are seen to advantage. 
Unfortunately their effect is marred by the singularly ill- 
conceived and irritating device on the part of the author 
of * leaving off at the most interesting point.' In a single 
instance this trick might have been tolerated, but the 
reader loses patience when he finds it repeated again and 
again. This, however, is but a single example out of 
many which might be cited from Gait's writings of his 
propensity to ill-timed joking, and his seeming inability 
to take his own work seriously. 

It has been asserted that, of all Gait's novels. Sir 
Andrew Wylie was the most popular south of the Tweed. 
If this was so, its popularity was due far less to intrinsic 
desert than to the accident that a great part of the action 



JOHN GALT 69 

of the story takes place in England, whilst the principal 
actors — among whom is included a portrait of Lord Bless- 
ington — instead of belonging to the Scottish lower or 
middle classes, are members of the English aristocracy. 
A success based upon such grounds as these has of course 
no real value, and besides being of tedious length, the 
novel in question falls in other ways far short of the 
author^s best achievements. Andrew Wylie is intended as 
the type of the canny young Scot who goes up to London 
and makes his fortune. We see him first as a queer 
* auld-farrant ' urchin, and then as an eident thrifty youth. 
He fully means to get on, he has the sharpest of eyes to 
see on which side his bread is buttered, and, above all, he 
has none of the ordinary failings of youth, and sows no 
wild oats. In fact he is rich in all those serviceable 
qualities of which perhaps the perfect exemplar in real 
life is no Scot but the Yankee Benjamin Franklin, and he 
has a quaint vein of native humour thrown in. And yet, 
notwithstanding so many qualities and so few infirmities, 
he is no prig, but, like Franklin, compels not only our 
respect, but our liking. So far the author has done well. 
But when he goes on to describe * Wheelie's ' rise in the 
world, we feel that the means of his advancement are 
altogether too phenomenal. With such a friend as the 
Earl to help him, what young man might not have risen ? 
But this is only a single instance of his luck. Throughout 
his career, the hero meets with the consistent and amazing 
good-fortune of a prince in a fairy-tale, making conquests 
at first sight not only of lackadaisical Riversdales and 
scatter-brain Dashingwells, but of the King and of Pitt 
himself. And so, as the story progresses, its improbability 
increases, until in the scenes between Andrew and the 



70 FAMOUS SCOTS 

dowager, and Andrew and the baronet, it becomes flatly 
and absolutely incredible. In this particular — I mean in 
the entire disproportion between the effect produced by 
the hero upon the reader and that which he is supposed 
to exercise on the other characters in the book — the story 
shares the fundamental defect of another Scottish novel, 
the work of a much more pains-taking hand — The Little 
Minister. 

Gait's next publication of importance was The Entail — 
a novel of which the theme is ' gear,' a Scotsman's per- 
tinacity in gathering it, and his tenacity in holding it when 
gathered — a matchless subject for the illustration of national 
character. And in this case the mere desire of acquisition 
is elevated and to some extent humanised by being asso- 
ciated with another characteristic passion of the Scot — to 
wit, the pride of family. The story turns upon the dis- 
inheriting, for estate reasons, by Claud Walkinshaw, Laird 
of Grippy, of his eldest son, and on the events which 
spring therefrom. Walkinshaw, who is the representative 
of an old but ruined family, has been brought up in 
penury, but at an early age has set before himself as his 
aim in life the reconquest of the family estates. Towards 
this object every step he takes is directed ; in its interest 
every secondary consideration is sacrificed. His youth has 
been spent in haggling as a pedlar, and when, having by 
his own exertions established himself in trade, he decides 
to marry, he goes, of course, * where money is.' His first- 
born, Charles, is his favourite son ; but even paternal 
affection must give way before the ruling passion. Watty, 
the second son (a masterly sketch) has been a ' natural ' 
from his birth. But he is heir to the estate of his maternal 
grandfather, and it is only through a transaction depend- 



JOHN GALT 71 

ing on the possession of this property that a Walkinshaw 
can be reinstated in possession of the undiminished 
Walkinshaw estates. To these circumstances Charles is 
without hesitation sacrificed, and his father's dream seems 
at last to be reaUsed. But, though he has gained his 
point, the old man finds himself further than ever from 
contentment. The stars in their courses seem to fight 
against him, the consequences of his unjust act recoil 
upon him, and he is even driven to believe himself an 
object of heavenly vengeance. Thus — in his character as 
a father visited by retributive justice through his children 
— Claud Walkinshaw may be considered the P^re Goriot 
of Scottish fiction. And so far the book is fine; but 
unfortunately, from this point — about midway — the level 
of excellence is not sustained. In the midst of his woes, 
Claud is carried off by a shock of paralysis ; but the evil 
he has done lives after him, thus supplying material for 
the remainder of the novel. But the calculating business- 
man, the youngest of the three brothers, who now suc- 
ceeds to the role of principal character, is colourless in 
comparison with his father. The writing, too, though 
relieved by the delightful sallies of the * Leddy Grippy ' — 
one of the very best of Scotchwomen in fiction — becomes 
diffuse to such a point that we wax impatient for the ex- 
piation of the old man's misdeeds by his disinterested 
grandson. Both Scott and Byron are said to have read 
this book three times, but the modern reader will probably 
rest content with a single perusal. 

Its shortcomings notwithstanding. The Entail was favour- 
ably received, and by this time the author is said to have 
been so elated by success as to boast that his literary 
resources were far greater than those of Scott, or any other 



72 FAMOUS SCOTS 

contemporary.* Whether in deliberate rivalry or not, 
certain it is that, by turning his attention to the historical 
romance, he now entered the field which the Wizard had 
made particularly his own. In the meantime he had 
taken up his abode at Esk Grove, near Musselburgh, where, 
in possible emulation of Abbotsford, he is said to have 
contemplated building a heritable fortress,' exactly in 
the fashion of the oldest times of rude warfare. 

The results of his bold literary enterprise were seen 
in Ringan Gilhaize, The Spaewife, and Rothelan — the first 
two published in 1823, the third in the following year. 
In an article from the pen of Mr Francis Espinasse, in 
the Dictionary of National Biography, these books are 
disposed of as ' three forgotten novels ' ; but the descrip- 
tion lacks discrimination. Forgotten, for aught I know 
to the contrary, they may be; but at least one of the 
three deserved a happier fate. Ringan Gilhaize is, in 
fact, a very fine historical romance, and one, it may be 
said in passing, which would well repay resuscitation at 
the hands of some enterprising publisher. A happy 
instinct had directed Gait in his selection of a period 
which is certainly the most important, as it is one of 
the two most romantically interesting, in Scottish history. 
For though the War of Independence be the darling 
theme of Scottish patriotism, what I may call the War 
of Religious Liberty enjoys the two-fold advantage of a 
wider sympathy and a deeper intellectual significance. 
Gait has skilfully conducted us through the entire period 
of this struggle, for his story, opening during the regency 
of Marie of Lorraine, concludes with the battle of Killie- 
crankie, whilst of intermediate historical events which 

* R. P. Gillies, Memoirs of a Literary Vete7'an^ vol. iii., p. 59. 



JOHN GALT 73 

bear upon the main issue, the greater number receive 
some notice in passing. Of course the danger of such a 
proceeding is lest fiction become subordinate to fact, thus 
making the main interest of the book an historical rather 
than an imaginative one. But this danger Gait has 
cleverly avoided. His method is to bring bygone times 
home to us through the imagination — as, for instance, 
in the scene of the gathering of devout persons in Gil- 
haize's house, or the open air preaching near Lasswade — 
whilst at the same time quickening our interest in his- 
torical occurrences — such as the battle of Drumclog, or 
the march of the Covenanting forces to Edinburgh — by 
causing his imaginary characters to participate in them. 
This, I conceive to be the true philosophy of the historical 
romance. And into the spirit of the particular movement 
with which he deals, it must be acknowledged that Gait 
has penetrated further than Scott. For the true aim of 
the writer of a novel treating of these times in Scotland 
was obviously to disregard such a non-essential as spo- 
radic insincerity, to penetrate the outer crust of dourness 
and intolerance, and whilst maintaining the balance of 
perfect fairness, to compel the reader to sympathise with 
the best of the Covenanters, not only in their bitter 
resentment of cruel wrongs, but in their most earnestly 
cherished and loftiest ideals. And this, which Scott did 
not care to do. Gait has accomplished, in virtue of which 
achievement his book is entitled to rank as the epic 
of the Scottish religious wars. 

In attempting to embrace within the compass of a 
single novel the one hundred and thirty years or so of 
his period, the author of Ringan Gilhaize was certainly 
assaying a very hazardous experiment. For one thing, of 



74 FAMOUS SCOTS 

course it was necessary that he should change his hero 
more than once, and the risk by so doing of dispersing 
and losing the reader's interest was immense. But w^hilst 
by taking the family instead of the individual as his unit, 
he has preserved artistic consistency, from this danger he 
has escaped unscathed. For from the time of the mission 
of Michael Gilhaize to St Andrews, and his adventures 
with the wanton Madam Kilspinnie, to that of the death 
of Claverhouse by the hand of the half-deranged or * illu- 
minated' Ringan, the interest of the story never flags. 
It abounds in fascinating passages of adventure— such as 
the journey of the elder Gilhaize to Eglinton, or the 
wanderings of Ringan and Mr Witherspoon after the fight 
at Rullion Green; whilst, having already referred to an 
advantage possessed by Gait over Scott, I may here add 
that there are passages in this book evincing a literary style, 
an intensity, and a delicacy with which Sir Walter could 
not compete. Such is the passage describing Gilhaize's 
reflections whilst waiting, in the grey of morning, at the 
gate of Lord James Stuart's house; the passage which 
follows, describing the spreading of the news that John 
Knox has arrived in Edinburgh, and that which describes 
the dalHance of the Queen of Scots with the Reformer on 
Loch Leven shore. That Scott was a far greater writer, 
as he was a far happier man than his contemporary, no 
reviewer in his senses would venture to deny. But that 
Gait possessed quahties which Scott did not possess, 
though less freely acknowledged, is not less true. When 
the number and extent of his works is considered, it must 
be owned that the occasions upon which Gait puts forth 
his full powers, or allows us to praise him without reserve, 
are sadly few. All the more reason, therefore, that when 



JOHN GALT 75 

he does give us such an opportunity, we should avail 
ourselves of it with courage and without stint ! It now 
only remains to add that the book is written in clear and 
terse old Scots, to which a dash of the peculiar phraseo- 
logy of the Reformed Church adds a touch of quaintness. 
* Surely something must have come over Gait ! ' is one's 
involuntary exclamation on reading his next book, for a 
greater falling off from Rmga?i Gilhaize than The Spaewife 
can scarcely be imagined. Here even the writing is slipshod ; 
but, alas ! these ups and downs are but too characteristic of 
the author. Like the former work, in the cabals and fac- 
tions of the rival claimants — or, more properly, aspirants 
— to the Crown of Scotland during the reign of James the 
First, The Spaewife has a promising and powerful theme. 
But of the treatment of this theme it may be said that it 
can boast scarcely one redeeming feature. The conduct 
of the tale is involved and obscure, and abounds in 
incidents and dialogues which, while tedious and perplex- 
ing in themselves, serve neither to illustrate character 
nor to advance action. Indeed, the reader is heavily 
taxed to remember the motives and the relations with 
one another of the different persons presented. Nor is 
the book appreciably stronger in the department of 
character-drawing. Upon the poet-king, the romantic 
ill-fated lover of Joanna Beaufort, one would suppose that 
a novelist might delight to lavish his best art. Instead of 
this, the King and Queen of the story are mere blanks. 
Catherine Douglas is no better, and such originality in 
character-sketching as the book can show — and that is 
not much — is to be found in the portraits of Glenfruin, 
the deep though simple-seeming Highland chieftain, and 
of the timorous and vacillating Earl of Athol. 



76 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Rothelan^ a tale of the times of Edward the Third — the 
historical portions of which are drawn from an interest- 
ing work on that period written by Joshua Barnes, an 
antiquary of the seventeenth century — is unfortunately 
more nearly on the level of The Spaewife than on that 
of Ringan Gilhaize. The book is not wanting in spirited 
scenes, but the welding of history and romance is but 
imperfectly accomplished, notwithstanding an abuse of 
breaks and gaps, abrupt transitions and passages irrelevant 
to the main narrative. Then again, between the machina- 
tions of the conscience-haunted Amias and his in- 
scrutable henchman Ralph, and the counter-machina- 
tions of the wily Adonijah, the intricacies of the tale are 
so much too subtle as to end in puzzling the reader himself. 
In a passage which may perhaps have been intended as a sly 
hit at Scott, the author expressly disclaims any attempt to 
reanimate the ' scenes of chivalry, and the pride, pomp, 
and panoply of war,' or to restore the archaic language, or 
the * fashions of the draperies, or the ornaments and 
architecture in the background.' His concern, he tells 
us, is not with such subordinate matters as these, but 
directly with the human heart itself. For a poet or 
novelist the position is a perfectly tenable one, and it is 
not to this but to the fact that he lets us see that he 
does not take his work seriously, that the author's 
failure is due. For into his lighter scenes an element of 
burlesque, which had already peeped out in his last book, 
again obtrudes itself; and burlesque, though a capital 
thing in its way, is here entirely out of place. Neither 
could it under any circumstances be supposed by a writer 
of historical fiction that the illusion which it is his busi- 
ness to produce would be assisted by discussion of such 



JOHN GALT 77 

topics current at the time of writing as Sir Walter 
Scott's Redgauntlet^ or the question of the three-volume 
novel. 

As under favourable conditions there is perhaps no 
form of labour more delightful than literary work, so there 
can be none more sickening when it is half-hearted or 
against the grain. Gait had now produced two novels in 
succession in which it was but too apparent that his heart 
was not, and he may well have felt weary of the work. Or 
their languor may have been due to the fact that his interest 
had been drawn off in another direction. At any rate, 
after a long and — if we judge it by its best productions — 
an extremely brilliant spell at his desk, he now practically 
abandoned it for some years to come. Well had it been, 
not only for his best interests, but for his material happi- 
ness, had he remained where he was ! 

The immediate occasion of this change in his life was 
as follows : — It happened that some of the principal 
inhabitants of Canada, whose property had sustained 
damage in the American War of 1814, had recently 
become urgent in their claims for compensation from the 
mother country. As the result of * proceedings ' on which 
the Autobiography throws no light, Gait was commissioned 
to act as agent in this country for the injured parties, 
which commission he accepted, undaunted by the worry 
and demands upon his time which it must necessarily entail, 
and set zealously to work to get the claims allowed by the 
Treasury. He gained his point subject to conditions, it 
being agreed by Government that the demands of the 
claimants should be satisfied from the proceeds of the 
sale of certain Crown lands in Canada known as the 
* reserves.' To find purchasers for this land now became 



78 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Gait's object, and mainly through his instrumentality the 
* Canada Company ' was formed. But in the meantime, 
the inhabitants of Upper Canada, among whom party 
spirit ran unusually high, having prejudiced their case 
with Government, it was determined that the money 
realised by selling the reserves should be devoted to other 
purposes. Thus Gait found himself defeated in his ob- 
ject, and in this juncture he was persuaded to join the 
Canada Company as a member. He was then appointed 
a Commissioner to determine the value of the land to 
be purchased by the Company, and having crossed the 
Atlantic, he proceeded to York, the capital of Upper 
Canada, where the Commission prosecuted its enquiries. 
His health at the time was bad, but his task was congenial. 
From boyhood he had nourished a hankering after coloni- 
sation, and if we abate a few comparatively trifling dis- 
sensions, his experiences at this time seem on the whole 
to have been agreeable. In due course the Commis- 
sioners signed their report and returned to England, only 
to receive the news that their labours had been unex- 
pectedly complicated by action taken by the Canadian 
clergy in relation to the * clergy reserves.' After some 
difficulty this matter also was at length adjusted, and the 
Company having obtained its Charter, Gait was deputed 
to return to Canada to superintend the founding of the 
new colony. Whilst the affairs above-mentioned had 
been under discussion, he had, however, found time to 
produce The Omen and The Last of the Lairds y two small 
but admirable works in contrasted styles. 

Lindeed, the sustained excellence of the former suffices 
to constitute it his masterpiece in the purely tragic vein. 
It is likewise in all probability his most characteristic 



JOHN GALT 79 

work, its unique and special claim to attention consist- 
ing in the tense and lurid imaginative atmosphere which 
the author has created and made to pervade his tale. 
Availing himself of the autobiographical convention, and 
assuming a fantastic dramatic guise, he gives the rein to 
his fancy and roams at large in a world that is dominated 
by those presentiments, bodings, and subtle hidden rela- 
tions of things, which had always exercised so powerful 
a fascination over his mind. And yet — what is of vital 
importance in the effect which he obtains — these portents 
are never allowed to lead us away from the firm earth, or 
from actual life. From the very first the reader is brought 
under the potent spell of the author's imagination, and 
so perfect is the art that ever as the dark tale unfolds 
the author's grip gains in strength. There are passages 
of fervid and gloomy eloquence in the writing which 
recall nothing in literature so much as Chateaubriand's 
masterpiece, and it is notable that, whilst in other respects 
the two stories are entirely distinct, the mysterious and 
repellent point on which they turn is one. Rene was 
almost pure autobiography, and it is plain to those who 
have studied Gait's more intimate utterances that into 
The Omen he threw much of what was moody and 
fantastic in his own mind and personality. 

The Last of the Lairds is a pleasant comedy of old 
Scotch manners, rich in the masterly painting of old 
Scotch character. The plot turns on the making up by 
busybodies of a match between a withered spinster and an 
elderly, partly imbecile, and ruined landlord — the threatened 
ugliness of the theme being averted by a gaiety rare in 
Gait's work, and also — as in the case of some of Hogarth's 
pictures — by sheer skill and power displayed in the char- 



8o FAMOUS SCOTS 

acterisation. The contrasted meddlers, the bride and her 
sister, the Nabob, and the Laird's Jock are all of them 
capital ; whilst the Laird himself, though failing to attain 
the breadth and dignity proper to a type, is at least a good 
and by no means ungenial portrait. The change wrought 
in him by marriage, if surprising, is not incredible, and 
serves to pave the way for the welcome^ happy ending. 
This book, which was left incomplete by Gait when he 
returned to America, received some finishing touches from 
his friend Moir, though the hand of the latter cannot be 
said to be traceable in its pages. 

Late in the year 1826, the author returned to Canada, 
having already,1 by his own account, some grounds for 
believing that he was regarded with hostility. Whether 
these suspicions were purely morbid or not it is impossible 
to say, but a general consideration of his fitness for the 
work to which he had chosen to devote his Hfe may not be 
out of place. There is every reason to believe that he 
was afterwards harshly and unjustly used; yet judging 
solely from what he himself has told of himself, one 
must allow that he was not precisely the sort of man 
to select for the discharge of important public 
business. That his ability was extraordinary, and his 
power of work immense, has been amply established ; 
none the less does it remain true that in certain qualities 
not less essential to business he was positively defective. 
Morbidly sensitive, he lacked the wisdom to control his 
feelings under a sense of injury, and was too much inclined 
to form conclusions, and to act, upon impulse. In addition 
to this, imagination or fancy — of which, in a world con- 
stituted as ours is, the mere suspicion will often suffice to 
prejudice a man in his dealings with his fellow-men — was 



JOHN GALT 8t 

far too active a power in his brain. But, to leave such 
considerations as are grounded upon character and revert to 
substantial facts, what was the assumption from Galt^s 
previous history as a man of business? That history 
reveals a goodly number of schemes and of attempts, 
scarce one of which but had proved abortive or a failure. 
Surely, if he was in truth a competent business man, 
ill-luck must have pursued him with uncommon per- 
tinacity; and even allowing this to have been the case, 
he will still stand condemned as a wretched judge of 
the chances of success inherent in any given business 
concern. The years at which we have now arrived were 
the most momentous in his life as a man; but in a 
sketch of his literary career, such as the present, their 
place is subordinate. 

Haunted by presentiments of evil even at the time of 
leaving home, Gait had scarcely reached Canada when his 
troubles began. In fact his differences with Sir Peregrine 
Maitland, the Lieutenant-Governor of the province, date 
from the morning after his arrival. Of this disagreement 
it is sufficient to say that Gait was not the aggressor, 
though very likely his previous conduct had been less wary 
than behoved for one in his delicate position. Certainly, 
with all due sympathy for a much-suffering man of genius, 
it cannot be asserted that his temperament was one cal- 
culated to smooth away difficulties, or, where self-love was 
concerned, to carry him pleasantly out of a misunder- 
standing. The Governor, besides suspecting him of 
unfriendliness to the Government, was jealous of a sup- 
posed inclination to interfere in public matters outside his 
sphere ; and though these suspicions were alike ground- 
less, it unfortunately happened that a communication 

F 



82 FAMOUS SCOTS 

which Gait had addressed to the editor of an opposi- 
tion journal afforded a specific ground of complaint. 
Here, at once, were all the materials for a very pretty 
quarrel. 

A visit to Quebec, however, brought more agreeable 
experiences, social and adventurous. Thence Gait pro- 
ceeded to York, to commence the duties of his mission. 
He was now practically in sole charge of the business of 
the Company, but he seems to have felt quite equal to his 
responsibilities, and when winter was over he decided 
to begin operations by founding a city in the Company's 
territory. Determined to clothe the occasion with as 
much impressiveness as possible, and having selected St 
George's Day as an auspicious date, he accordingly travelled 
to the appointed site — the last nine miles of the journey 
lying within the primeval forest. Here is his account of 
the proceedings : — 

* It was consistent with my plan to invest our ceremony with a little 
mystery, the better to make it be remembered. So intimating that 
the main body of the men were not to come, we walked to the brow 
of the neighbouring rising ground, and Mr Prior having shown the 
site selected for the town, a large maple tree was chosen ; on which, 
taking an axe from one of the woodmen, I struck the first stroke. To 
me at least the moment was impressive, — and the silence of the woods, 
that echoed to the sound, was as the sigh of the solemn genius of the 
wilderness departing for ever. The doctor followed me, then, if I 
recollect correctly, Mr Prior, and the woodmen finished the work. 
The tree fell with a crash of accumulating thunder, as if ancient 
Nature were alarmed at the entrance of social man into her innocent 
solitudes with his sorrows, his follies, and his crimes. I do not sup- 
pose that the sublimity of the occasion was unfelt by the others, for I 
noticed that after the tree fell, there was a funereal pause, as when the 
coffin is lowered into the grave ; it was, however, of short duration, 
for the doctor pulled a flask of whisky from his bosom, and we drank 
prosperity to the City of Guelph.' 



JOHN GALT 83 

The name was chosen in compliment to the Royal 
Family. To matter-of-fact minds the characteristic tone 
of this passage may appear dangerously poetical, so per- 
haps it is well to add that the site of the new city had been 
most judiciously chosen. Occupying a tongue of land pro- 
jecting into a river, almost in the centre of the district 
which separates the lakes of Ontario, Simcoe, Huron, and 
Erie, the infant township enjoyed extraordinary facilities 
for communication. It became prosperous, and within the 
space of forty-five years its population had reached the 
total of 50,000. 

Gait now threw himself with great zeal and energy into 
his work, which was on a grand scale and of a stimulating 
character, and, besides the founding of cities, included the 
felling of forests, exploration, and the naming of places 
unnamed. To a voyage undertaken for the purpose of 
finding a harbour on Lake Huron, was due the origin of 
the now flourishing city of Goderich. Of course the 
romance of this sort of life, together with the sense it gave 
him of playing an important part in the spread of civilisa- 
tion, were agreeable and flattering to Gait; but in other 
respects his position was not without drawbacks. Those 
symptoms of troubles to come which had so early pre- 
sented themselves to him had by no means disappeared ; 
whilst, as he assures us, secret enemies were also at work 
against him. There were not w^anting signs of friction 
between the Government and the Directors of the Com- 
pany, the stock of the latter fell to a discount, and the 
Directors thereupon taxed their Commissioner with ex- 
travagance in the carrying out of his plans. He began to 
find himself subjected to petty annoyances, and at this 
time an incident in which he had humanely, but perhaps 



84 FAMOUS SCOTS 

injudiciously, befriended some helpless emigrants served 
further to embroil matters. 

In this juncture, he received a private warning to expect 
a reprimand from his Directors. No doubt there were 
faults on both sides, but conscious that he had done his 
best, and smarting under the injustice of being assumed 
unheard to be in fault, he placed his resignation in the 
hands of a friend. The friend, however, decided not 
to present it, and Gait therefore continued his labours as 
before, evincing an astonishing fertility in projects and 
ideas, of which we may suppose a fair proportion to have 
been applicable enough to his circumstances. Unfortun- 
ately causes of annoyance continued to flow in upon him, 
and it was evident that a climax was not far off. 

The spectacle now afforded by the Autobiography is a 
melancholy one. It is that of a gifted and generous- 
minded, though unduly irritable, man-of-letters entangled 
in toils of red-tape, and in the meantime exposed to the 
darts of his enemies. In such a contest — though in 
some respects Gait was a giant pitted against pigmies — 
it was a foregone conclusion that he must come off second- 
best. Matters were precipitated by the Directors appoint- 
ing an accountant to assist him in his duties. The 
conduct of this person supplied grounds for a belief that 
he was authorised to exercise surveillance over the 
Superintendent, and such a position being intolerable, 
Gait resolved to return to England. Indeed he found 
himself driven to the conclusion that it was intended to 
break up the Company, and that his own removal from 
office would be a step towards that end. Unfortunately 
he was destined to undergo treatment even less agreeable 
than that which he anticipated. Circumstances having 



JOHN GALT 8s 

compelled him to defer his return to England, he paid 
a final visit to Goderich, and had arrived at New York on 
his homeward journey when he was informed that he had 
been superseded. As he had been on the point of 
retiring from the service, his material position remained 
practically unaffected. But his resignation, if indeed it 
were irrevocably determined on, had certainly not been 
publicly announced, and to a man of his temperament it 
must have been gall and wormwood to have forcibly taken 
from him even though 'twere but that which he was ready 
to resign. No wonder that he felt himself to have been 
treated with the vilest ingratitude. * The Canada Com- 
pany,' he writes, * had originated in my suggestions, it was 
established by my endeavours, organised in disregard of 
many obstacles by my perseverance, and, though extensive 
and complicated in its scheme, a system was formed by 
me upon which it could be with ease conducted. Yet 
without the commission of any fault, for I dare every 
charge of that kind, I was destined to reap from it only 
troubles and mortifications, and something which I feel as 
an attempt to disgrace me.' * 

The writer of the article, before referred to, in the 
Dictionary of National Biography has spoken of the 
Autobiography as * remarkable for self-complacency.' It 
is, therefore, only fair to state that the value which Gait 
puts upon his own services as a colonial organiser is not 
unsupported by testimony from without. The report of a 
local expert, incorporated in Gait's narrative, testifies not 
only to the intrinsic excellence of his system, but to the 
success attending it ; whilst an address of gratitude and 
good wishes presented by the settlers in the new city bears 

* Autobiography, vol. ii,, p. 157. 



86 ' FAMOUS SCOTS 

witness to the personal estimation in which they held him. 
Indeed one of the main causes of his failure seems to 
have been that he took too high a view of his own 
mission, aspiring to aim at the good of humanity, where 
his associates and principals were content to contemplate 
gain : a Quixote set to perform the work of a Board com- 
posed of Sancho Panzas. Even at this date, had he been 
informed at once that his dismissal must be regarded as 
final, he would have been spared some suffering. But his 
agony — the term is scarcely an exaggeration — was pro- 
longed by suspense and by unavailing struggles. And 
finally, as if anything were yet wanting to complete the 
irony of his position, he lived to see the Company which 
he had himself founded, and in the service of which three 
of the best years of his life had been spent, develop into 
a flourishing concern, yielding abundant profits in which 
he had no share. 

Misfortunes come not singly, and the fall of the lion is 
the opportunity of meaner creatures. The determining of 
his connection with the Canada Company had hit Gait 
severely in his pecuniary circumstances. He now found 
himself unable to meet the claims which were made upon 
him, and at the suit of a certain Dr Valpy of Reading, 
one of the oldest of his English acquaintances, to whom 
he owed the paltry sum of ;^8o for the education of his 
sons, he was presently arrested. Conscious as he was 
of unimpeachable probity of intention, and marking, as 
in his Utopian way he did, a distinction between law and 
justice, he felt this last indignity keenly. He, however, 
made no sign, but endured with imperturbable stoicism a 
long period of confinement. None the less — partly by 
the physical restraint to which he was so little accustomed, 



JOHN GALT 87 

partly, as he himself with only too much show of prob- 
ability suggests, by distress of mind — his constitution 
was irreparably injured. He was now entirely dependent 
on his pen, and though his literary activity continued as 
great as before, the literary fruits which he put forth had 
lost the fineness of their old savour. Of this he seems 
to have been aware, for he has put on record the fact that 
his later novels were written to please the public, not 
himself, and that he would not wish to be estimated by 
them. For our purpose, therefore, a hasty glance at them 
may suffice. 

In 1830 he published Lawrie Todd, a tale of life in 
the backwoods, which, with Bogle Corbet, or The Emigrants, 
(1831), was founded upon fact, and designed by the author 
to serve the double purpose of amusing the general reader 
and conveying reliable information to those practically 
interested in the American colonies. Southennan, a tale 
of the days of Mary Queen of Scots, also published in 
1830, was inspired by the tradition associated with a 
romantic old mansion-house, which had impressed Gait's 
fancy in youth. In the same year he also produced his 
Life of Byron, of which — so keen was public interest in 
the subject at the time — three editions were exhausted in 
as many months. The author's view of the noble poet's 
character has been already indicated ; his work has, how- 
ever, been pronounced Valueless.' About this time he 
also acted as editor of The Courier, a Tory newspaper ; 
but, finding the work uncongenial, after a few months 
abandoned it. In 183 1, by way of a change of employ- 
ment, at the suggestion of Lockhart, who was always a 
good friend to him, he put together his amusing Lives of 
the Players, In the same year he took up his abode at 



88 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Brompton — a suburb in those days not yet absolutely 
devoid of the charms of the country — where for some 
three or four years to come he occupied Old Barnes 
Cottage, a somewhat dilapidated building, but one which 
possessed the invaluable appendage of a large and pleasant 
garden. 

It was at this time that Carlyle met him at a dinner- 
party at the house of Fraser, the publisher, and wrote a 
description of him. But before quoting this sketch, we 
may give that of Moir, penned some eight years earlier. 
At that time, according to the Doctor's testimony. Gait 
was *in the full vigour of health,' a man of herculean 
frame, over six feet in height and inclining to corpulency, 
with jet-black hair as yet ungrizzled, nose almost straight, 
small but piercing eyes, and finely rounded chin. When 
Carlyle saw him, trouble had already told upon him. 

* Gait looks old,' he writes,* * is deafish, has the air of a 
sedate Greenock burgher; mouth indicating sly humour 
and self-satisfaction ; the eyes, old and without lashes, 
gave me a sort of wae interest for him . . . Said little, 
but that little peaceable, clear and gutmuthig. Wish to 
see him again.' This account he supplemented a month 
later as follows : * A broad gawsie Greenock man, old- 
growing, lovable with pity.' 

The need for pity soon increased. It has been stated 
that Gait's health had suffered from his confinement, it 
was about this time further affected by the first of a long 
series of shocks, which are described as of a nature 

* analogous to paralysis.' This sufficed to destroy such 
hopes of active employment as remained to him — and 
he had been, as usual, hard at work weaving schemes 

* 'Journal,' under date January 2ist, 1832. 



JOHN GALT 89 

with all his former ingenuity — and in process of time 
reduced him to a wreck. Still he clung to his pen, 
adding to the already lengthy list of his works the novel 
of Stanley Buxton^ or The Schoolfellows^ as well as two 
political satires entitled The Me?nber and The Radical, 
Mrs Thomson, authoress of * Recollections of Literary 
Characters,' an old friend, who visited him when he was 
growing ever more and more disabled, has left a touching 
account of his helplessness. Gait received her without 
rising from his seat, gave her his left hand, and pointing 
to his right, said, 'with a little quickness, "Perhaps you 
have heard of my attack ? It has fallen upon my limbs ; 
my head is clear." ' Alas ! though clear, his mental 
powers were by no means what they had been. But, 
if on some former occasions he had shown himself too 
much a prey to moral sensibility, where physical suffering 
was concerned his behaviour was that of a stoic. Whilst 
the progress of the disease deprived him of the use of 
one limb after another, he continued, uncomplaining, to 
make the most of such powers as yet remained. Indeed, 
during the three or four years immediately following his 
first seizure, his annual literary output in the departments 
of editing, book-making, and story-writing, seems if any- 
thing larger than usual. But among all these under- 
takings, it is sufficient here to name the novels of Eben 
Erskiney or The Traveller^ and The Stolen Child^ with the 
three volumes of tales collected under the title of Stories 
of the Study y and the Autobiography and Literary Life and 
Miscellanies, The lax composition of the latter works is 
probably a symptom of mental decay in the author. The 
book last named was dedicated by permission to William 
the Fourth, who in acknowledgment of the compliment 



90 FAMOUS SCOTS 

sent Gait ;^2oo, which money, together with ;2^So ob- 
tained for him from the Literary Fund, may be said to 
represent the sum of official, or quasi-official, recognition 
which he received. For his claims against Government 
for * brokerage,' or commission, on the sale of lands to the 
Canada Company w^ere refused, whilst a pension said to 
have been promised him by the Company was never paid. 
The last years of his life w^ere spent in dependence, but 
it is pleasing to note that the Autobiography closes with 
an expression of satisfaction over the payment of secured 
debts. He had in the meantime been removed to the 
house of a sister at Greenock, where he died on the nth 
April 1839, not having yet completed his sixtieth year. 

In summing up Gait's position, it may be said that he 
remains the most unequal of all writers possessing equal 
claims to distinction — the man who could produce The 
Provost and jRingan Gilhaize and who did produce The 
Spaezvife and The Literary Life, For it is not enough to 
say, as has been said, that in him there were two men, 
the man of letters and the man of affairs : there were two 
literary men in him, the creative artist and the book- 
maker. And the fact that, of these two, the latter had 
things too much his own way was due to Gait's defective 
appreciation of his high calling. * My literary propensi- 
ties,' he writes, 'w^ere suspended during my residence 
in Upper Canada, not from resolution, but because I 
had more interesting pastime. I did then think myself 
qualified to do something more useful than "stringing 
blethers into rhyme," or writing clishmaclavers in a 
closet.' And again : * At no time, as I frankly confess, 
have I been a great admirer of mere literary character; 
to tell the truth, I have sometimes felt a little shame- 



JOHN GALT 91 

faced in thinking myself so much an author, in con- 
sequence of the estimation in which I view the profession 
of book-making in general. A mere literary man — an 
author by profession — stands low in my opinion/ The 
jpetulance and perversity of the first statement, and the 
sheer vulgarity of the second, may be palliated by the 
fact that the author was in low spirits and bad health 
when he made them. It remains none the less true that 
these opinions ruled his practice. But they carried their 
punishment with them. For who will doubt that Gait 
would have been a happier man had he been truer to his 
vocation, had he resisted the temptation to fly off at a 
tangent in pursuit of every commercial will-o'-the-wisp 
that might chance to catch his eye, and devoted his 
great powers with something more of steadiness and of 
seriousness to doing his best at what he was best qualified 
to do ? 

He expected that fuller appreciation would come to 
him after death, and perhaps this expectation, so fallacious 
in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, was in his case 
not without plausible grounds. For, from a literary point 
of view. Gait, like De Stendhal, was in advance of his 
time. Employing the word in its specialised sense, he 
was more * modern ' than the greatest among his contem- 
poraries. For example, as has been already indicated, 
when most himself he had more of what we are pleased 
to consider the characteristically modern qualities of sen- 
sitiveness and imaginative intensity than had Scott. In 
illustration of this, perhaps we cannot do better than cite 
the already quoted Omen, with its sombre and lurid 
effects, the sense of bated breath, suspense, impending 
tragedy, which pervades its every page. Nothing of all 



92 FAMOUS SCOTS 

this, as I need hardly say, was in Scott's line; even in 
the finest and most imaginative of his shorter pieces, in 
My Aunt Margarefs Mirror^ the tension is eased by 
characteristic diffuseness of manner. And Gait's superior 
— some will call it morbid — sensitiveness extended also 
to his style : his use of words, when he is at his best, is 
much more interesting than Scott's. It might possibly 
even be argued that his Scotch, if perhaps less abundant, 
is more remarkable for nice appropriateness of word and 
phrase than Sir Walter's. [And, by the way, the failure 
of Gait's reputation to cross the Tweed may, perhaps, be 
partly explained by the fact that, whereas in Scott's novels 
the dialogue alone is Scotch, in some of Gait's best books 
the entire narrative is interspersed with dialect words. 
One can fancy, for instance, the puzzled condition of a 
southern reader who is informed by the author himself 
that *Mrs Malcolm herself was this winter brought to 
death's door by a terrible host that came on her in the 
kirk,' or that a certain clock * was a mortification to the 
parish from the Lady Breadland.'] But, to continue our 
argument, besides the above, Gait has more of the modern 
pictorial quality than Scott : there is more in his descrip- 
tive work which is addressed directly to the eye. Once 
more, he repeatedly gratifies a modern taste by choosing 
for his theme what is fantastic, or occult, or what lies off 
the beaten track. In stating all this, we would, of course, 
guard against being understood to imply that all these 
characteristics are points of advantage possessed by Gait 
over Scott. On the contrary, some of them may even be 
symptoms of an age of literary decadence; what we do 
maintain is that, in virtue of these characteristics, his 
chance of appealing to a late nineteenth-century audience 



JOHN GALT 93 

is improved. As a final word under this heading, Gait 
may be called the forerunner of the Realistic movement 
in Scottish fiction. The Provost and The Annals might 
almost belong to the age of Tourguenieff and Mr Henry 
James, and in this respect his works have been more 
studied than they have been praised, their influence has 
been greater than their reputation. Generally, and in 
conclusion, Gait may be credited with having done to 
some extent for Glasgow and the West of Scotland what 
Scott triumphantly accomplished for the Borders and the 
Highlands, and for the trading and professional classes 
of his country what Scott did for its gentry and peasantry. 



D. M. MOIR 

'delta' 

* After all, how precarious a thing is literary fame ! Things 
to which I have bent the whole force of my mind, and 
which are worth remembering — if any things that I have 
done are at all worth remembering — have attracted but a 
very doubtful share of applause from critics ; whilst things 
dashed off like Mansie Wauch^ as mere sportive freaks, and 
which for years and years I have hesitated to acknowledge, 
have been out of sight my most popular productions.' 
Thus wrote Moir, under date of April 12th, 1845 — six 
years before his life's labours closed — to his friend and 
biographer, Thomas Aird, author of The DeviPs Dream, 
And in this instance posterity has taken its cue from 
contemporary popularity ; for it is upon the homely and 
genial Maftsie Waiich^ and on that alone, that the once 
considerable literary reputation of * the amiable Delta ' 
rests to-day. 

David Macbeth Moir, born on the 5th January 1798, 
was the son of Robert Moir and Elizabeth Macbeth, whom 
Aird describes simply as * respectable citizens.' His birth- 
place was Musselburgh, and to Musselburgh he remained 
faithful through life. Indeed, though lives of men-of- 
letters — from Shakespeare to Thomas Hardy — afford 
plenty of instances of local attachment, there can be few 
instances I should suppose of lives more closely associated 
94 



D. M. MOIR 95 

with a single place. In Musselburgh Moir's life was spent ; 
Musselburgh he served faithfully, both in his profession 
and as a public servant; and in the neighbourhood of 
Musselburgh he placed the scene of his most popular 
work. Gratifying is it, therefore, to know that Musselburgh 
has recognised him as her poet — a minor writer certainly, 
yet exclusively her own. 

Having received his schooling in his native town, at the 
age of thirteen young Moir was bound apprentice to a 
physician in practice there. His apprenticeship lasted four 
years, during the latter part of which, as also during the 
year following, he studied medicine in the Edinburgh 
University. In 1816 he obtained his surgeon's diploma. 
In the following year he lost his father, and being then 
eighteen, became the partner of a Dr Brown of Mussel- 
burgh, whose practice kept him so occupied that for more 
than ten years to come he is said not to have spent a single 
night out of the town. 

Meantime, having a facile pen (too facile it has proved ! ) 
he had begun to compose as far back as 181 2, about which 
year he sent two essays to a Haddington publication 
entitled The Cheap Magazine, In 1816 he contributed 
to the Scots Magazine^ and, further, commemorated the ex- 
ploit of Lord Exmouth by publishing anonymously The 
Bombardment of Algiers^ and Other Poems, Despite 
pressure of work, he did not give up literature on entering 
the medical profession, but in time became a contributor 
to Constable's and Blackwood's Magazine — to the latter 
of which, over the signature *A,' he came regularly to 
furnish not or^^ jeux d^ esprit but essays and serious verse 
as well, his contributions in all amounting to the large 
total of nearly four hundred. In this manner he became 



96 FAMOUS SCOTS 

acquainted with John Wilson, for whose showy poetry he 
entertained an admiration which was doubtless less uncom- 
mon then than it would be now. Other periodicals to which 
he contributed were Fraser's Magazine and the Edinburgh 
Literary Gazette, Between medicine and literature, his 
life now went on busily but uneventfully. In the end of 
1824 or the commencement of the next year, he published, 
under his pseudonym, a volume of verse to which he gave 
the title of the Legend of Genevieve^ which he dedicated to 
the veteran author of the Man of Feeling, The titular poem 
is a sentimental story written in the manner of Byron's 
Tales, the remaining pieces being on miscellaneous sub- 
jects. About the same time the first instalments of Mansie 
Watich made their appearance in Blackwood^s Magazine^ 
the completed story, with additions, being published as a 
book in 1828. Moir was a man of an intensely domestic 
disposition, and having become affianced in this year, in 
the following summer he took to himself a wife in the 
person of Miss Catherine Bell of Leith, whom he espoused 
in the Church of Carham in Northumberland, celebrating 
the occasion by a series of Sonnets on the Scenery of the 
Tweed. By this lady he eventually became the father of 
eleven children. His literary reputation was now estab- 
lished, and in 1829 Mr Blackwood made him an offer of 
the editorship of the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture^ 
which, however, he declined. In remaining constant to 
the medical profession, he has been credited with purely 
philanthropic motives; but, without bating a jot of my 
respect for the man, the following (his own) explanation of 
the case seems to me the more reasonable one. * In early 
youth,' says he, in a letter to David Vedder, the sailor 
poet of Orkney, ' I had many aspiring feelings to dedicate 



D. M. MOIR 97 

my life to literature, and to literature alone ; but I thank 
God — seeing what I have seen in Gait, in Hogg, in Hood, 
and other friends — that I had resolution to resolve on a 
profession, and to make poetry my crutch and not my 
staff. I have, in consequence, lost the name which, prob- 
ably, with due exertion, I might have acquired ; but I have 
gained many domestic blessings which more than counter- 
balance it, and I can yet turn to my pen, in my short 
intervals of occasional relaxation, with as much zest as in 
my days of romantic adolescence/ This is the utterance 
of a sensible man who, having his way to make in the 
world, decides on the expediency of a certain course and 
adheres to it. Possibly Moir's estimate of his own powers 
was a juster one than that of many of his friends ; at any- 
rate it is satisfactory to learn that, * in spite of the common 
distrust of the literary character,' he succeeded in making 
his way as a doctor even in that place where proverbially 
a prophet is apt to lack honour. Mr Blackwood and 
others of his friends also urged him to leave Musselburgh 
and to set up in practice in Edinburgh, offering to use 
their interest in obtaining patients for him. But these 
offers he likewise declined. His next publication (1831) 
consisted of Outlines of the Ancient History of Medicine^ 
and was intended as the first instalment of a complete 
history of the subject, although increased pressure of pro- 
fessional duties, occasioned first by the events of the next 
year and then by the retirement of his partner in the year 
following, prevented his further execution of the design. 

The period at which we have now arrived is one 
of those which have been rendered terribly memorable 
by a visitation of cholera, and in the commencement of 
1832 the town of Musselburgh was attacked with special 

G 



98 FAMOUS SCOTS 

severity by the epidemic. So great was the terror pre- 
vailing throughout the country that many physicians are 
said to have fled from their posts, but now, as also during 
a later outbreak, was the time when Moir's character 
shone out with peculiar lustre. Rising to the height of 
the emergency, he was to be found night and day at his 
post, endeavouring both to lessen the sufferings of the 
sick by his medical skill, and to comfort the dying with 
the consolations of religion. His humane exertions on 
behalf of the poor were, in particular, remarkable. This 
is a period regarding which one would gladly supply 
further facts, for it is, no doubt, the most interesting in 
Moir's life, and it is consequently with regret that we 
find it passed over in a few lines in the accredited 
biography. When that was written, circumstantial details 
of his faithful labours might still have been collected, 
and these would have brought the man nearer to us 
than anything else could do. But Aird has given us 
nothing but generalities. During the outbreak, Moir 
held the post of Secretary to the Board of Health of 
Musselburgh, and it was as an answer to numberless 
enquiries addressed to him in this capacity that he now 
wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled * Practical 
Observations on Malignant Cholera,' which, says Aird, - 
flew like wild-fire through the country, and which he 
shortly supplemented by * Proofs of the Contagion of 
Malignant Cholera.' 

No doubt by way of recruiting after his labours, he 
this year attended the Meeting of the British Associa- 
tion, which was held at Oxford, and afterwards visited 
London, mainly in order to see Gait, with whom he had 
become friendly some years before, and who was now 



D. M. MOIR ^ 99 

living in broken health at Brompton. On this occasion 
he had an interview with Coleridge at Highgate. The 
sage, who received him in bed, and treated him to 'two 
hours of divine monologue,' talked at first of his own early 
life, incidentally reciting part of his early-written Monody 
on the Death of Chatterton, and so far all went well. 
But Moir, who had a constitutional dislike of mysticism, 
and who ought to have known better, had the rashness to 
put a few questions to the poet, * relative to his peculiar 
speculations in philosophy,' and from that moment, 
needless to say, he found himself involved in the 
intricacies of a labyrinth. 

As that of a medical man in the full swing of a large 
practice, Moir's life now affords but little material to the 
biographer. In a letter to Robert Macnish, his dearly- 
loved friend and brother in medicine and the muses, he 
has himself described his daily existence. ' Our business,* 
says he, ^has ramified itself so much in all directions of the 
compass— save the north, where we are bounded by the 
sea — that on an average I have sixteen or eighteen miles' 
daily riding ; nor can this be commenced before three or 
four hours of pedestrian exercise has been hurried through. 
I seldom get from horseback till five o'clock; and by 
half-past six I must be out to the evening rounds, which 
never terminate till after nine. Add to this the medical 
casualties occurring between sunset and sunrise, and you 
will see how much can be reasonably set down to the 
score of my leisure.' Still, such leisure as he had, he 
perseveringly devoted to literature. When driving upon 
his rounds, he would read in his carriage ; but his chief 
time for study was after the house was shut up for the 
night, when all was quiet around him, and when he 



100 FAMOUS SCOTS 

could, with some degree of comfort, sit down in his 

library to read and write. 'Even then, however, from 

the uncertainty of his profession, he was never altogether 

sure of his own time. Often did he remark that, whether 

it was the contrariety of human nature, or his own 

peculiar sensitiveness to interruption at such a time, he 

was most liable to be broken in upon when he was most 

deeply engaged in writing.' Under such circumstances 

we cannot wonder that his literary work lacks finish. The 

wonder is rather that he did not give up literature 

altogether ; but we read that he loved it too well to do 

this, and that he never seemed so happy as w^hen his 

mind was employed upon it. As a doctor of literary men, 

he exercised a beneficial influence. Shortly before the 

death of Mr Blackwood, that gentleman lay ill in Ainslie 

Place; whilst Gait, who was also in bad health, w^as 

living in lodgings close by. Relations between the two 

had been strained, and illness prevented their meeting. 

But it is pleasing to read that their mutual respect and 

esteem were now renewed, and that Moir, who was in 

attendance on both, carried kind messages between them. 

A most affectionate parent, Moir had sustained a 

succession of cruel bereavements by losing three of his 

children, who died in early childhood, within the space of 

about eighteen months, in the years 1838 and 1839. To 

relieve his feelings on these occasions, he wrote a series of 

elegies, which, after being circulated among his friends, 

were published, with a few other poems, in 1843, under 

the title of Domestic Verses, It is as an elegiac poet — if 

as a poet at all — that the author is now remembered, and 

one of these elegies — called by the self-conferred name of 

one of the babes, 'Casa Wappy' — has enjoyed great 



D. M. MOIR loi 

popularity and is still included in anthologies, though in 
my own opinion a less meritorious composition than the 
the second of the three poems on the same subject, en- 
titled ' Casa's Dirge ' :— 

* Now winter with its snow departs, 

The green leaves clothe the tree ; 
But summer smiles not on the hearts 

That bleed and break for thee : 
The young May weaves her flowery crown, 

Her boughs in beauty wave ; 
They only shake their blossoms down 

Upon thy silent grave. 

His elegiac muse is sweet and fluent, and breathes the 
consolations of Christianity. But, like Motherwell, he is 
apt to be over-lachrymose and to insist upon his grief, 
which is fatal to pathos. His touch, too, is uncertain. 
For instance, in one Sonnet we have this fine line, 

* The bliss that feeds upon the heart destroys,' 

in near juxta-position with the ridiculous figure, 

* Joy's icicles melt down before Time's sun.' 

Here as elsewhere, too, he freely repeats himself. Aird 
has named T/ie Deserted Churchyard as Moir's highest 
imaginative piece. But Aird is no critic, and description 
was not Moir's forte. He multiplies touches — each per- 
haps good in its way — multiplies them, indeed, to excess ; 
but to combine and compose them into a whole is beyond 
him. And the same defect — the mark either of an 
inferior talent, or of an untutored one — is noticeable in 
his critical portraits. Of his poetry generally, then, it 
it must be confessed that it belongs to that class which, 
finding acceptance to-day, is without significance for the 
morrow. But, in justice, it must be remembered that in 



102 FAMOUS SCOTS 

its own day it not only pleased the general reader, but 
also drew warm praises from such judges as Tennyson, 
Jeffrey, Wordsworth, and Lockhart. Moir's time, as we 
have seen, was not at his disposal, but besides — or per- 
haps because of this — he was an impatient composer. He 
chose — if such things be determined by choice — to write 
much rather than to write well. As a whole his poetry is 
inferior in style to that of his less prolific contemporary, 
Thomas Pringle. And certainly, if poetry is intended to 
endure, it must be moulded in some less pliant material 
than that which Moir employed. 

Not much now remains to tell. In the year after the 
publication of his Domestic Verses^ Moir contracted a 
serious illness by sitting all night in damp clothes by the 
bedside of a patient, and in 1846 his general health suf- 
fered further from the effects of a carriage accident, which 
also permanently lamed him. In 1848 he made an ex- 
cursion, lasting two and a half days, and meditated during 
seven previous years, to the Lake District with Mrs Moir ; 
and in the following year he visited the Highlands, with 
Christopher North, who was ^ in great force,' Henry Glass- 
ford Bell, and one or two others. In spring of 1851, he 
deHvered a course of six lectures at the Edinburgh Philo- 
sophical Institution, his subject being the Poetical Litera- 
ture of the Past Half Century. On appearing on the 
platform, he had a very warm reception, and his lec- 
tures, proving popular, were soon afterwards published ; 
nor have they quite lost their interest yet. Of course at 
the present day no one would be likely to turn to them 
for an estimate of the genius, say, of Byron or of Shelley, 
or for a summing up of the poetical achievement of 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Keats. It is in the nature of 



D. M. MOIR 103 

things that truth in criticism, as in evidence, is arrived at 
by a slow process, and abler pens have dealt with these 
great writers since Moir's day. But should anyone wish 
to know the estimation in which they were held at the 
date in question, he will generally find a good indication 
of it here. And in so doing, as was inevitable, he will 
come across some curiosities of criticism — as, for instance, 
where the lecturer, speaking of Byron and Wilson together, 
as the two rising poetic lights of the year 181 2, adds that 
' it is difficult even yet to say which of the two was most 
distinguished for general scope of mind, for imaginative 
and intellectual power.' Also, should any student desire 
a sketch — descriptive rather than critical — of such half- 
forgotten literary figures as 'Monk' Lewis and his fol- 
lowers, or of the * artistic artificial school ' of Hayley, the 
* Swan of Lichfield,' and the Delia Cruscans, or seek for 
appreciative observations on the author of The Farmer's 
Boy^ on Kirke White, or on Samuel Rogers, here he will 
find them. Besides these lectures and the works al- 
ready mentioned, Moir's literary undertakings include an 
edition of the works of Mrs Hemans, an Account of the 
Antiquities of the Parish of Inveresk, written for the 
Statistical Account of Scotland (1845), ^^^ ^ f^w occa- 
sional monographs. 

On the 22 nd of June of this year, in dismounting from 
his horse at the door of a patient's house, Moir sustained 
further injuries to his already partially disabled leg. Failing 
to rally from the effects of this accident, and hoping to de- 
rive benefit from rest and change, about a week later he set 
out upon a short excursion. Mrs Moir accompanied him, 
and they had reached Ayr, and had visited the cottage 
where Burns first saw the light, when the Doctor becam§ 



104 FAMOUS SCOTS 

seriously ill. Declining medical assistance, however, he 
struggled on to Dumfries, where he became so much worse 
as to be forced to take to his bed. It was soon evident 
that death was at hand. On hearing of his illness, several 
of his friends had hastened to his side, and surrounded 
by these and by members of his family, faithfully attended 
by his wife, and fortified by a firm religious faith, he 
passed away on the morning of Sunday, the 6th July. 
The inhabitants of the town in which he had laboured so 
indefatigably decreed him a public funeral, paying every 
mark of respect in their power to his memory, and shortly 
afterwards his statue, executed by a sculptor named Ritchie, 
who had been a pupil of Thorwaldsen, was erected in a 
commanding situation on the banks of the river Esk. 
Besides his professional labours, he had been a Member 
of the Council of his native town and of its Kirk Session, 
had attended the General Assembly as a Representative 
Elder, and had acted as Secretary to a local Reform Com- 
mittee appointed on the eve of the passing of the great 
Bill. In fine, his life had been essentially that of the 
good citizen — an honourable part for which we have so 
high a respect that we should be glad to see it oftener 
adorned with literary distinction. 

In person Moir was tall, well-formed and erect, of 
sanguine complexion and with hair tending to the * sandy ' 
hue, his keen sense of humour, during friendly intercourse, 
being particularly manifest in his countenance. In private 
life, he was amiable and exemplary, and much beloved by 
many friends, including several distinguished writers — *a 
man,' says the writer of his obituary in Blackivood^s Maga- 
zine^ *who, we verily believe, never had an enemy, and 
never harboured an angry or vindictive thought against a 



D. M. MOIR I OS 

human being/ Nor did this proceed from any lack of de- 
termination or force of character, of which he had plenty. 

Did not one recognise the relation subsisting between 
humour and pathos, it would be a surprise to find the 
melancholy Moir — the mourner of a score of dirges — 
figuring as author of a succession of broadly and farcically 
comic episodes; for such, in the main, is the Life of 
Mansie Wauch^ Tailor in Dalkeith, The book was con- 
ceived in avowed imitation of Gait ; and, in general out- 
line, the autobiographical tailor, with his unconscious self- 
revelation, is obviously suggested by the Provosts and 
Micah Balwhidders of that writer. For in literature Gait 
is as much the originator of the ' pawky ' Scotsman of the 
commercial or professional class as was the creator of 
Dinmont and Headrigg of the Scotsman living on the soil 
and racy of it. But if Delta borrowed the first idea of 
the story from his friend, the means by which he develops 
it owe little or nothing to that source. There, indeed, 
the sprightly little volume reminds us of a very different 
class of literature. In their frank appeal to those who 
are easily amused (happily a numerous body), and in the 
pleasant clownish ness of their fooling, a large proportion 
of the scenes recall forcibly the ancient folk-tales, * drolls ' 
and chap-books, or the more modern collections of local 
stories founded upon the same, and the peculiar style of 
humour associated with such time-honoured popular 
favourites as Lothian Tom and George Buchanan, the 
King's Jester. Incidents, for instance, like that of James 
Batter, the weaver, concealed in the closet during the visit 
of the Minister, and of his inopportune fall through the 
bottomless chair and imprisonment there, or of the big 



io6 FAMOUS SCOTS 

suit of clothes being sent home to the little man, and the 
little suit to the big man, belong to the primeval stock-in- 
trade of the rustic humourist; whilst as for the episode 
of Deacon Paunch and the cat — probably there are few 
parishes in the country boasting the possession of a 
phenomenally heavy man where some * variant' of this 
story is not current at the present day. The epigram — 
if I may so call it — of the book is also conceived after 
the popular model ; as, for instance, when the aggrieved 
collier-woman, taunting Cursecowl on the prominence of 
one of his features, declares that he has ^run fast when 
the noses were dealing * ; when it is observed, in reference 
to the various grades of society and their interdependence, 
that *we all hang at one another's tails like a rope of 
ingans'; or when the writer speaks of an * evendown 
pour of rain, washing the very cats off the house-tops,' 
or remarks of hopes not quite likely to be fulfilled that 
* many a rottener ship has come to land.' Some of these 
phrases may perhaps be proverbial, but at any rate into 
just such verbal moulds flows, or used to flow, the ex- 
pression of the livelier fancy of the people. The Scotch, 
too, in which the book is written is singularly rich and 
racy. 

It may possibly be asked whether stories such as those 
referred to above have much to gain from literary elabora- 
tion, brevity in this peculiar form of wit appearing perhaps 
even more than usually desirable. The answer is that the 
result has justified the experiment. For one thing, 
Ma?tste Wauch — which preceded the Pickivick Papers by 
some years— is one of the earliest classic specimens of 
broad humour which is entirely free from coarseness ; 
and, secondly, in this instance, most of the farcical epi- 



D. M. MOIR 107 

sodes — such as the mock duel, the Volunteering scene, 
the scenes in the watch-house or with the dumb spae- 
wife, and the playhouse scene, where Mansie so artlessly 
mistakes feigning for reality — are made in a way to serve 
the purpose of illustrating character. In the case last 
named — even allowing for the tailor's native simplicity, 
for the fact that this is his first play, and for the ^ three 
jugs ' of which he has partaken in the company of Glen, 
the farmer — a pretty strong call is made on humorous 
convention, or on the credulity of the reader. But, after 
all, in this style of writing, who would 'consider curiously'? 
No ! give the humourist his head is the rule, concede 
him a trifle of exaggeration, and let him make you laugh 
if he can. This book was never meant for closets and 
the midnight oil, but to be read aloud over the fire on 
winter's eves in the family circle. 

Of course strokes of humorous portraiture somewhat 
subtler than the above are by no means wanting, as 
is shown for instance, in the same scene, in the fuddled 
tailor's preoccupation with the clothes worn by the actors 
— the good coat 'with double gilt buttons and fashion- 
able lapells,' or 'the very well-made pair of buckskins, a 
thought the worse of the wear, to be sure, but which 
if they had been cleaned, would have looked almost as 
good as new.' But throughout the book little Mansie is 
equally 'particular,' especially in regard to clothes, — he 
has the loquacity of one occupied in a sedentary 
manual toil, and the abounding detail in description of 
minute occurrences which characterises dwellers in small 
towns. The scene of the stampede from the barn, 
following his reply to the players, is quite in the best 
manner of the humourists and caricaturists of that day, — 



io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

when uncouth persons tumbling one over the other in 
their haste, coat-tails torn off, bull-dogs fastening teeth 
in human calves, and wigs flying to the winds, seem to 
have constituted a never-failing resource for * bringing 
down the house.' Pity that, like Mercutio, we are become 
grave men since then ! However by far the best scene of 
this sort — a classic of its kind — is that which paints the 
inroad of the gigantic butcher, infuriated at the misfit of 
his new killing-coat, into the tailor's shop, and the sub- 
sequent tussle between him on the one hand and Tommy 
Bodkin, the three 'prentices, Mansie, and James Batter 
on the other. Everywhere George Cruikshank, the illus- 
trator of the book, is neck and neck with the author, 
hitting off the very spirit of his fun, and indeed some- 
times adding a point to it; but in his delineations of 
this scene and of that with the spaewife he surpasses 
himself. 

Of course the book would not be Moir's if it entirely 
lacked poetic and pathetic relief, which is supplied in the 
contents of the papers found in the Welshman's coat- 
pocket ; in the episode of Mungo Glen, the apprentice 
from the Lammermoors, who dies of home-sickness and 
of a country boy's hatred of the town, and in the story 
of the Maid of Da?nascus. 

Of the character of Mansie — the keystone, so to speak, 
of the book — it cannot be said that it stands out with the 
firmness and clearness of Gait's best work in the kind, 
still less of one of Miss Ferrier's inimitable creations. 
Yet, if somewhat faintly limned, the little tailor — so 
eager, so busy, and so thrifty, such a queer mixture of 
guilelessness, shrewdness, and superstition, ' a douce elder 
of Maister AViggie's kirk,' and abounding in Scriptural 



D. M. MOIR 109 

allusion accordingly, cautious, yet apt to be * overtaken ^ 
as well as overreached, but with his heart exactly in the 
right place — is a figure who in the long run wins and holds 
a place in our sympathy. In the course of his profes- 
sional avocations, Moir may have had occasion to observe 
that tailors generally are a nervous race of men, and from 
the commencement of the narrative we are shown that 
Mansie is full of groundless fears and anxieties — terrified 
to discharge his musket when on parade as a Volunteer, 
and frightened out of his wits in the Kirk Session house 
by night. And yet in the hour of need, when house and 
home are in danger on the night of the fire, we see him 
brave as a lion and brimful of resource — saving 'the 
precious life of a woman of eighty that had been four long 
years bed-ridden,' and by well-directed efforts with his 
bucket accomplishing more than the local fire-engine had 
done. Such a contrast as this — at once effective and true 
to human nature — or as that where Mansie, finding the 
escaped French prisoner concealed in his coal-hole, is 
divided between wrath against the enemy of his country 
and sympathy for a fellow-creature in distress, put the 
finishing touches to a genial figure, which in our Scottish 
national literature has a little niche of its own. 



MISS FERRIER 

Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, the great mistress of the 
novel of manners in Scotland, was born in Edinburgh on 
the 7th September 1782, and was the youngest of her 
parents' ten children. Her father, James Ferrier, was a 
younger son of John Ferrier, laird of Kirklands, in Ren- 
frewshire, and her mother — whose maiden name was 
Helen Coutts — was the daughter of a farmer near Mon- 
trose. James Ferrier was by profession a Writer to the 
Signet, having been admitted a member of the Society in 
the year 1770. He had been trained to his vocation in 
the office of a distant relative, who had the management 
of the Argyll estates, and to this gentleman's business he 
ultimately succeeded. He was thus on terms of intimacy 
with the Duke of Argyll, through whose instrumentality 
he was appointed a Principal Clerk of Session. In this 
office he had Sir Walter Scott as a colleague, and he 
was also so fortunate as to enjoy the friendship of Henry 
Mackenzie, author of the admirable Man of Feelings of 
Dr Blair, and last, not least, of Burns. Thus, from her 
earliest years onward, his young daughter must have been 
accustomed to see and to hear of the literary lights of the 
Scotland of that day. 

After their marriage, Mr and Mrs Ferrier occupied a 
flat in Lady Stair's Close in the Old Town. Their large 
family was made up of six sons and four daughters. 
When Susan was fifteen she lost her mother, and soon 



MISS FERRIER iii 

afterwards she was taken by her father to visit at Inver- 
ary Castle, the seat of his patron the Duke. Here a 
new world was opened to the plainly brought up Edin- 
burgh girl. Here for the first time she saw fashion and 
the *high life/ and here — either on this or some subse- 
quent occasion — she formed several acquaintances which 
were destined to influence her career. Under John, fifth 
Duke of Argyll, society at the Castle had at that period 
a somewhat literary and artistic tone. Among its visitors 
was the accomplished Lady Charlotte Campbell — after- 
wards Lady Charlotte Bury — a name which, if unknown 
to the present generation, was once of some repute in the 
world of letters. Lady Charlotte was the Duke's younger 
daughter, and had inherited much of the beauty of her 
mother, the celebrated Elizabeth Gunning. She was just 
seven years older than Susan Ferrier, was distinguished 
by a passion for the belles-lettres^ and was accustomed to 
do the honours of Scotland to the literary celebrities of 
the time. During the year of Miss Ferrier's first visit to 
the Castle, she published anonymously a first literary 
venture, which bore the conventional title of 'Poems 
upon Several Occasions,' by 'A Lady.' 

It may readily be guessed that this fascinating and 
high-born personage — distinguished as she was by the 
honours and the romance of authorship — produced her 
due impression on the imagination of the young visitor. 
Susan's literary instincts must certainly have been 
quickened by the intimacy — for a friendship which 
lasted till death sprung up between herself and Lady 
Charlotte. But, if she was a gainer in one direction 
from the acquaintance, I am inclined to believe that she 
was a loser in another. Years after, when she herself 



112 FAMOUS SCOTS 

became an authoress, her earUest work was disfigured by 
direct and unsparing portraiture of Uving persons among 
her acquaintance. Now no doubt this kind of writing 
may be productive of extreme mirth to persons quaUfied 
to read between the lines, and it must be acknowledged 
that Miss Ferrier's talent has made the mirth outlast its 
immediate occasion. Still, judged as art, this kind of 
thing is neither great nor gracious, and to her credit be 
it said that the authoress of Marriage lived to see that 
this was so, and to amend her style accordingly. It may 
be noted, however, that the works attributed to her friend 
Lady Charlotte include conspicuous instances of a similar 
error in taste. Amid the vicissitudes of many years, her 
ladyship lived to produce a number of works of fiction, 
of the contents of which such titles as Flirtation^ The 
Journal of the Hearty A Marriage in High Life, may afford 
some indication. But the single work with which in the 
present day her name is associated — and if she never 
acknowledged the authorship, it must be remembered 
that she resisted all provocations to deny it — is the 
notorious Diary in which a lady-in-waiting of Caroline of 
Brunswick has chronicled the follies and indiscretions of 
that unhappy princess, and the unpleasantnesses of daily 
life in her Court. Bearing this in mind, one can scarcely 
regard the brilliant Lady Charlotte as the best of friends 
for a young woman, her inferior in years and station, 
though greatly her superior in talent. 

Among other visitors met by Susan at Inverary, two 
may be particularised as having afterwards contributed 
by their oddities to enliven the pages of her first book. 
These were the eccentric Mrs Seymour Damer, the 
amateur sculptor and friend of Horace Walpole, and 



MISS FERRIER 113 

Lady Ferrers, widow of the peer who was hanged for 
the murder of his steward. With a Miss Clavering, .a 
grand-daughter of the Duke, who was a child of eight 
at the time of her first visit to the Castle, she struck 
up an eager friendship. An animated correspondence 
was started between them, some of the letters in which 
have been preserved. These are for the most part 
undated, but have reference to a work of fiction which 
the young ladies proposed to undertake in partnership, 
and it is thus that the germ of Marriage is first brought 
to light. 

* I do not recollect,' says Miss Ferrier, writing in high 
spirits ; ' I do not recollect ever to have seen the sudden 
transition of a high-bred English beauty, who thinks she 
can sacrifice all for love, to an uncomfortable solitary 
highland dwelling among tall red-haired sisters and grim- 
faced aunts. Don't you think this would make a good 
opening of the piece ? Suppose each of us try our hands 
on it.' And, later on, after submitting a portion of her 
work, she writes again : — ^ I am boiling to hear from you, 
but I've taken a remorse of conscience about Lady 
Maclaughlan and her friends : if I was ever to be 
detected, or even suspected, I would have nothing for 
it but to drown myself. I mean, therefore, to let her 
alone till I hear from you, as I think we might compound 
some other kind of character for her that might do as 
well and not be so dangerous. As to the misses, if ever 
it was to be published they must be altered or I must fly 
my native land.' 

In this passage, even after allowing for girlish facetious- 
ness of expression, Susan Ferrier appears in the character 
of an accomplished ' quiz,' sailing dangerously close to the 

H 



114 FAMOUS SCOTS 

wind. Of course her correspondent is delighted with 
the specimen of work submitted to her, and will not hear 
of anything being altered. What school-girl would ? She 
essays to allay her friend's fear of discovery, and offers to 
take the responsibility of the personalities upon herself. 
In a subsequent letter, dated December 1810, she 
describes reading the manuscript to Lady Charlotte 
during a drive. Her ladyship laughed as she had never 
been seen to laugh before, and pronounced the fragment 
* without the least exception the cleverest thing that ever 
was written' — a verdict which after more detailed ex- 
amination she endorsed in writing, declaring it to be 
^ capital^ with a dash under it.' Not otherwise do the 
thoughtless and light-hearted egg each other on to 
mischief. 

But Miss Ferrier was by this time eight-and-twenty 
years of age. Her native strong good sense asserted 
itself, and for a long time she resolutely declined to 
publish her work. (I ought ere this to have explained 
that the intended collaboration with Miss Clavering had 
fallen through, the sole passage contributed by the 
younger lady being the brief and not particularly interest- 
ing History of Mrs Douglas). In course of time, how- 
ever, the merits of the book became known to persons 
having more authority to judge them than Lady Charlotte 
Bury or her niece. Mr Blackwood, the publisher, read 
the manuscript, and strongly urged the authoress to pre- 
pare it for publication ; whilst no less a personage than 
Sir Walter Scott, in the conclusion to his Tales of My 
Landlord — then seemingly in proof — referred flatteringly 
to a * very lively work entitled Marriage ^^ and singled out 
its author for mention among writers of fiction capable of 



MISS FERRIER 115 

gathering in the rich harvest afforded by Scottish char- 
acter. At length, in 1 8 1 8 — after undergoing several 
changes in the interval — the book was given to the world. 
It was published anonymously, and the authoress, speak- 
ing at a later date, professes to have believed that her 
name * never would be guessed at, or the work heard of 
beyond a very limited sphere.' But from such obscurity 
the gallery of portraits which it contained must alone 
have sufficed to save it. For, in addition to the two 
ladies already mentioned — whose oddities appear to have 
contributed jointly to the inimitable figure of Lady 
Maclaughlan — the three spinster aunts were drawn from 
certain Misses Edmonstone, whilst Mrs Fox represented 
Mary, Lady Clerk, a well-known Edinburgh character of 
the time. It must not, however, be supposed that the 
vogue of the book depended upon adventitious circum- 
stances alone ; for Marriage soon became popular far 
beyond the limits of any local set. In London it was 
attributed to the pen of Sir Walter Scott, and it is even 
stated to have been very successful in a French trans- 
lation. 

Its success at home can surprise no one, for never 
before had the idiosyncrasies of Scottish society been so 
vigorously pourtrayed. As has already been seen, the 
means adopted for showing them off are ingeniously con- 
trived. At the commencement of the story we are intro- 
duced to the beautiful but shallow and artificial Juliana, 
the Earl of Courtland's only daughter — a young lady who 
has been trained solely with a view to social success and 
the formation of a brilliant alliance, the more solid parts 
of education having in her case been systematically 
neglected. She is betrothed to the elderly Duke of 



Ti6 FAMOUS SCOTS 



but at the last moment throws him over and 



elopes to Scotland. The companion of her flight is 
Douglas, a handsome young officer in the army, the child 
of Scotch parents, but brought up in Engkxid by a 
wealthy adoptive father. The honeymoon is scarce over 
when the young people find themselves, not only partially 
disabused of their illusions, but in actual pecuniary straits. 
Juliana's elopement has hopelessly alienated the Earl ; 
whilst Douglas, absent from his regiment without leave, is 
superseded in the Gazette, In these circumstances the 
only course open to them is to take up their quarters with 
the bridegroom's father, at his castle of Glenfern in the 
Highlands. Their proposal to do so is most cordially 
received, and now the irony of circumstance begins to 
declare itself. Lady Juliana has repeatedly protested that 
with the man of her choice she could be happy in a 
desert. But then her idea of a desert, as she avows when 
'tis too late, is a beautiful place full of roses and myrtles, 
which, though very retired, would not be absolutely out 
of the world ; where one could occasionally see one's 
friends and give dejeuners and fetes champetres, A very 
different kind of place is Glenfern Castle. After a long 
journey in a drizzling rain through dreary scenery, their 
destination is reached, and Juliana makes her entree^ 
attended by her footman and lady's-maid, surrounded by 
her lap-dogs, squirrel, and mackaw, and encumbered by 
all the paraphernalia of an artificial elegance. Never was 
there a meeting between more opposed extremes. 

* At the entrance of the strangers, a flock of females rushed forward 
to meet them. Douglas good-humouredly submitted to be hugged 
by three long-chinned spinsters whom he recognised as his aunts, and 
warmly saluted five awkward purple^girls he guessed to be his sisters : 



MISS FERRIER 117 

while Lady Juliana stood the image of despair, and, scarcely con- 
scious, admitted in silence the civilities of her new relations.' 

The three elderly spinsters are the Laird's sisters — Miss 
Jacky, who is esteemed the most sensible woman as well 
as the greatest orator in the parish, Miss Grizzy the 
platitudinous, and Miss Nicky, who is not wanting in 
sense either ; and these representatives of a bygone social 
order are the most celebrated characters in the book. 

Appalled by the sight of the surroundings amid which 
her life is to be spent, and distressed by the insolence of 
a pampered lady's-maid who instantly throws up her place, 
Juliana presently succumbs to hysterics. 

* Douglas now attempted to account for the behaviour of his noble 
spouse by ascribing it to the fatigue she had lately undergone, 
joined to distress of mind at her father's unrelenting severity towards 
her. 

* " O the amiable creature I " interrupted the unsuspecting spinsters, 
almost stifling her with their caresses as they spoke. ** Welcome, a 
thousand times welcome, to Glenfern Castle ! " said Miss Jacky. 
'* Nothing shall be wanting, dearest Lady Juliana, to compensate for 
a parent's rigour, and make you happy and comfortable. Consider 
this as your future home. My sisters and myself will be as mothers 
to you : and see these charming young creatures," dragging forward 
two tall frightened girls, with sandy hair and great purple arms ; 
*' thank Providence for having blest you with such sisters ! " 

* '* Don't speak too much, Jacky, to our dear niece at present," said 
Miss Grizzy ; ** I think one of Lady Maclaughlan's composing draughts 
would be the best thing for her — there can be no doubt about that." 

* ** Composing draughts at this time of day !" cried Miss Nicky ; 
" I should think a little good broth a much wiser thing. There are 
some excellent family broth making below, and I'll desire Tibby to 
bring a few/' 

* '*Will you take a little soup, love?" asked Douglas. His lady 
assented ; and Miss Nicky vanished, but quickly re-entered, followed 
by Tibby, carrying a huge bowl of coarse Scotch broth, swimming 
with leeks, greens, and grease. Lady Juliana attempted to taste it, 
but her delicate palate revolted at the homely fare ; and she gave up 



ii8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the attempt, in spite of Miss Nicky's earnest entreaties to take a few 
more of these excellent family broth. 

**'I should think," said Henry^ as he vainly attempted to stir it 
round, *'that a little wine would be more to the purpose than this 
stuff." 

* The aunts looked at each other ; and, withdrawing to a corner, a 
whispering consultation took place, in which *' Lady Maclaughlan's 
opinion, birch, balm, currant, heating, cooling, running risks," &c. 
&c. transpired. At length the question was carried ; and some 
tolerable sherry, and a piece of very substantial short-hrcad, were 
produced. 

*It was now voted by Miss Jacky, and carried ne77i. con., that her 
ladyship ought to take a little repose till the hour of dinner.' 

So bad begins, but worse remains behind ; for these are 
but the occurrences of a few hours, whilst the visit is to be 
of long duration. However enough has been said to 
indicate the Hnes along which the story now develops. 
The feather-pate Juliana is not of those to whom Time 
brings wisdom, and a further acquaintance with her sur- 
roundings only serves to bring to light fresh disgusts. The 
gaunt apparitions of the first evening grow no less tiresome 
as she knows them better, no less hopelessly remote from 
every habit, tradition or association of her life. But her 
poison is the reader's meat. In the course of the next few 
pages we are introduced to Miss Grizzy's friend, Lady 
Maclaughlan, a distinguished amateur of medicine and an 
object of awed admiration to the sisters. As this lady 
steps upon the scene — fearfully and wonderfully attired, 
and bearing in her hand her gold-headed cane — with her 
deep-toned voice, her mercilessly blunt remarks, and her 
uncompromising * humph!' — her ineffectually recalcitrant 
little husband borne behind her much as if he were a 
parcel — she is certainly one of the most memorable figures 
in all fiction. And among the most laughable scenes in all 



MISS FERRIER 119 

fiction must certainly be counted those in which in high 
dudgeon she cuts short her visit to Glenfern Castle, and — 
still better, and indeed unsurpassable — in which the ill- 
starred spinsters, mistaking the day, arrive to visit her 
when they are not expected. 

Nor must it for a moment be supposed that such crea- 
tions as this and the Aunts are mere masterpieces of the 
caricaturist. In Miss Ferrier's best characters it may almost 
be said to be a rule that caricature enters only into the 
details, and is never allowed to interfere with the main 
outline. An accusation far more justly to be brought 
against the authoress of this book is that of hard-hearted- 
ness, or a defect of sympathy and even of toleration for 
her own creations. Susan Ferrier was an uncompromisingly 
candid woman, as her interesting account of the visits paid 
by her to Sir Walter Scott are enough to show. That her 
heart was a kind one we know ; but when she took pen in 
hand it was not her way to extenuate anything. Neither 
was she given to view persons or occurrences through any 
softening light of imagination or feeling. * What a cruel 
thing is a farce to those engaged in it!' wrote another 
Scottish author. But she, having devised a farcically cruel 
situation, squares her shoulders and regards its develop- 
ment with a ruthlessness more proper perhaps to science 
than to art. Not a touch of compunction has she for her 
heroine — who, intolerably selfish and heartless as she is, is 
yet but a child and the victim of the harshest circumstance ; 
not a touch of pity for the pathos and repression of such 
lives as those of the Aunts. In a word, tolerance is not 
her strong point. And, admirable as it is, her art yet 
suffers by the limitation of her sympathies. For one pines 
for the hundred little humanising touches by virtue of 



I20 FAMOUS SCOTS 

which the same characters — living though they be- — might 
have lived with a fuller and more gracious life. It is stated 
that Miss Ferrier's favourite author was La Bruybre, and 
in such studies as those of Lady Placid and Mrs Wiseacre 
he is obviously the model followed. And, though her best 
creations surpass those of her master as a living character 
will always surpass an abstract type, yet in this, her earliest 
effort, she still retains a good deal too much of the frigid 
intellectual method of the Frenchman. 

What will, perhaps, more generally be considered a 
legitimate ground for the unpleasant task of fault-finding is, 
however, the extremely inartistic construction of the book. 
As we approach the middle, we are surprised to find the 
interest shifted to an almost entirely new set of characters, 
who belong to a new generation. Thus at a time when 
Lady Juliana cannot be much more than eighteen years of 
age, she ceases to be prominent in the story, and after the 
briefest interval we are called on to follow the fortunes of 
her twin daughters, who are now nearing that age. The 
bridegroom, Douglas, and two of the Aunts disappear 
altogether from the book; and this is the more to be re- 
gretted because there are few readers but will infinitely 
prefer the racy humours of the elder generation to the 
insipid long-drawn-out love-affairs of the contrasted sisters, 
even when these are more or less successfully enlivened by 
the sallies of the shrewd Lady Emily, by the caricature 
figure of Dr Redgill the gourmand^ and by the absurdities 
of the literary precieuses of Bath. 

The success of Marriage^ justified by its painting of 
Scottish manners and by the figures of Lady Maclaughlan 
and the spinster aunts, had the right effect upon the 
sterling Scottish character of the authoress. It led her to 



MISS FERRIER 121 

try how much better still she could do. Six years elapsed 
before the appearance of her next book, which was pub- 
lished in 1824 — like its predecessor, anonymously. Indeed 
secrecy as to her literary undertakings appears to have been 
one of the novelist's strongest desires ; and, writing much 
of The Inheritance at Morningside House, near Edinburgh 
— where her father spent the summers — she complains of 
the smallness of the house as making concealment very 
difficult. 

In the endeavour to improve upon her first achievement. 
Miss Ferrier was triumphantly successful. * The new book,' 
wrote one of Mr Blackwood's correspondents at the time 
of its publication, *is a hundred miles above Marriage,^ 
Nor does this assertion overshoot the mark ; for if the one 
is at most a bit of brilliant promise, the other is a superb 
performance. Foremost among its advantages must be 
counted, in place of the slip-slop of Marriage^ an interest- 
ing and admirably-compacted plot, and a vigorous literary 
style — the latter marked indeed, yet not marred, by a 
mannerism of literary quotation. What was shapeless and 
redundant in Marriage is here moulded and restrained by 
exigencies of the story, with the result that characters well- 
defined, and skilfully contrasted and relieved, confront the 
reader standing boldly and firmly on their feet. 

Several features of The Inheritance seem to have 
been suggested by the celebrated Douglas Cause. The 
Honourable Thomas St Clair, youngest son of the Earl 
of Rossville, has forfeited the countenance of his family 
by marrying out of his own rank in life. He settles with 
his wife in France, and here in the course of years a suc- 
cession of deaths places him in the position of heir-pre- 
sumptive to the earldom. He announces at head-quarters 



122 FAMOUS SCOTS 

the important tidings that Mrs St Clair is expecting to be 
confined, and having done so, with the Earl's concurrence 
he and his wife prepare to return to Scotland. But the 
confinement takes place, prematurely, on the journey. A 
female child is born, after which event the projected return 
is indefinitely postponed. So much by way of proem. 
The opening of the story shows us Mrs St Clair, now 
a widow, and her daughter, Gertrude, a beautiful and 
blooming maiden, taking up their abode with the elderly 
and unmarried Lord Rossville, who recognises the young 
lady as heiress to his title and estates. Under his roof, 
attention is drawn to a likeness existing between Gertrude 
and the portrait of one Lizzie Lundie, a low-born beauty 
of a bygone day, who had sat as model for a painting in 
the Castle. This resemblance is noticed by more than 
one person, and on more than one occasion, and reference 
to it is generally accompanied by marks of agitation in 
Mrs St Clair. Meantime the youthful heiress has won 
the admiration of two young men, cousins of her own, 
who frequent the Castle — the handsome and elegant 
Colonel Delmour, a man of fashion and of the world, and 
the less showy but far deeper-natured Edward Lyndsay. 
A singular meeting now takes place between Mrs St Clair 
and a stranger named Lewiston, and soon afterwards it 
becomes apparent that the latter exercises a great, though 
unexplained, power over the lady. The stranger's identity 
is presently revealed as that of the husband — long supposed 
to be dead — of a nurse of Gertrude's, to whom she had 
been tenderly attached. At a nocturnal meeting with 
Lewiston, at which Mrs St Clair has by entreaty, and by 
throwing out vague threats, compelled her daughter to be 
present, Lyndsay arrives upon the scene in time to save 



MISS FERRIER 123 

Gertrude from molestation, and thus earns her gratitude. 
However Delmour now declares his passion, which 
Gertrude returns — with the result that an understanding 
is come to between them. But the Earl has other in- 
tentions regarding the disposal of the hand of his heir, 
which for family and political reasons he designs to confer 
upon the Coloners elder brother, a colourless man-of- 
affairs. By asserting her independence in this matter, 
Gertrude provokes Lord Rossville's displeasure; but the 
unforeseen effect of his lordship's purblind and blundering 
intervention is merely to bring to light the fact that 
Lyndsay also is in love with his beautiful cousin. The 
Earl, who has power to dispose of his possessions as he 
pleases, is meditating to disinherit Gertrude on account 
of her disobedience, when his sudden death leaves her 
free to follow her own wishes. In the meantime, Del- 
mour's conduct has supplied ground for doubting the 
purity of his motives ; whilst Lyndsay, who has again 
come to her rescue in a trying interview with Lewiston, 
has shown himself throughout a staunch friend to her 
best interests. But Gertrude is now Countess of Ross- 
ville in her own right ; her lover returns to her side, and 
she is herself too noble-minded to question his dis- 
interestedness. Under his influence she launches out 
into a variety of extravagant schemes, and going to 
London, where she becomes the admired of all admirers, 
devotes herself wholly to the pleasures of society, which 
for a time have rather an injurious effect upon her char- 
acter. Lyndsay makes an appeal to her better self, but 
amid the excitement of her surroundings his remonstrance 
passes unheeded. Jaded by the excesses of fashionable 
life, at the end of the season she returns to Rossville, 



124 FAMOUS SCOTS 

where the intrusive Lewiston, who has been thought 
drowned, now again appears upon the scene, and pro- 
voked by her disdainful treatment divulges the secret 
that she is the daughter, not of Mrs St Clair, but of her 
nurse, and that consequently she has no title to her pre- 
sent position. Overwhelmed by this intelligence, which 
Mrs St Clair's confession confirms, Gertrude loses no 
time in informing her lover of the true state of matters, 
and in so doing reveals the miserable shallowness of his 
nature. Delmour's love for the beautiful and high- 
spirited girl is genuine ; but nameless and without for- 
tune as she now is, he hesitates to fulfil his engagement 
towards her. Her love for him has been of such a different 
nature that she is well-nigh broken-hearted by the dis- 
covery. But the faithful Lyndsay stands her friend in 
need, and the book closes with her reinstatement, long 
afterwards, as his wife, in the brilliant position which 
she has already wrongly, though innocently, occupied. 

The plot of The Inheritance^ of which the above is a 
sketch, is a model of its kind, whilst from first to last the 
conduct of the narrative is perfect. Indeed the form 
of the story could not be improved — a rare merit even in 
a masterpiece of British fiction ; and though the book is a 
long one, it contains not a superfluous page. Am.ong the 
numerous authors quoted in the course of it are Shake- 
speare and the Greek dramatists, and perhaps, without 
stretching probability too far, we may assume that the 
authoress had studied the latter as well as the former. 
In any case The Inheritance in its own degree unites 
principal characteristics of the Greek and the Shake- 
spearian drama, for the web of circumstance inexorably 
woven about the innocent and unconscious heroine is 



MISS FERRIER 125 

entirely in the manner of the first, whilst the indifferent, 
life-hke alternation of tragic and ludicrous incident in 
the narrative is of a piece with Shakespeare's irony. No 
finer example of the latter could be cited than the 
impressive scene in which Lord Rossville, looking blankly 
from his window one snowy afternoon, is amazed to see a 
hearse approaching the Castle. Out of the vehicle, when 
it has reached the door, steps his lordship's pet aversion 
and the reader's delight — the undaunted and ubiquitous 
Miss Pratt. The voluble lady has a long story to tell 
of the circumstances which have compelled her to resort 
to this unconventional mode of conveyance, whilst the 
pompous Earl is scandalised at the general impropriety of 
the proceedings, and especially at thought of the hearse 
of Mr McVitae, the Radical distiller, putting up for the 
night at the Castle. However there is no help for it ; nor 
as it turns out is the visit so ill-timed as had seemed, for 
the next morning Lord Rossville is discovered dead upon 
his bed. 

But if the book is remarkable for its admirable story, 
certainly not less remarkable is it for the extraordinary 
wealth of character which it portrays. Probably few 
* novels of plot ' are so rich in character, few * novels of 
character ' so strong in plot. It may be that some carp- 
ing critic of the ungentle sex will be found to object 
to Lyndsay and to Delmour, the contrasted lovers of the 
heroine, as to * a woman's men' — to urge that their 
demeanour is too consistently emotional, too demonstra- 
tive, to be founded upon any very solid base of character 
or of disposition. But supposing (which I am far from 
granting) that there were some truth in this, here at any 
rate all ground even for hypercriticism must end. And 



126 FAMOUS SCOTS 

where in fiction is there a heroine more charming and 
more lovable than Gertrude St Clair — gentle yet high- 
spirited as she is, natural, and the soul of truth ? Her 
pretended mother — ambitious and worldly-minded, violent, 
embittered by the slights and mortifications of her youth 
and bent vindictively upon retaliation — rises to the dignity 
of tragedy. Then we have the inimitable rattle and busy- 
body, Miss Pratt, at home everywhere except in her own 
house, and incessantly referring to the sayings and doings 
of an invisible ' Anthony Whyte ' — a very masterpiece of 
humorous delineation ; and old Adam Ramsay, the cross- 
grained, misanthropic, Indian uncle, who yet compels our 
sympathy by his sentimental attachment to the home 
of his boyhood, and his constancy to the memory of his 
ill-starred love. Miss Bell Black, afterwards Mrs Major 
Waddell, is delightful in her perfect inanity and fatuity ; 
and though her creator may not yet have learned to suffer 
fools gladly, she certainly has by this time mastered the art 
of portraying ^as though she loved' them. The Earl of 
Rossville, puffed up by a sense of his own importance, long- 
winded, sesquepedalian and null ; Miss Lilly, the poetess, 
her Cockney lover and her brothers ; gentle Anne Black ; 
Miss Becky Duguid, the accommodating poor relation ; 
Mrs Fairbairn, the materfamilias ; and the peasant-woman 
whose misguided foresight leads her to prepare betimes 
her ailing husband's dead-clothes, — all of them are admir- 
able, and all bear evidence of being freshly observed from 
the life. But the writer has learnt the lesson of substitut- 
ing poetic for local truth; and if any portraits appear 
in this gallery — and it is stated that Adam Ramsay to 
some extent represents the authoress's father — they are 
such as can no longer rightly give offence to anyone. 



MISS FERRIER 127 

Miss Ferrier had reached middle life when she wrote 
The Inheritance^ and perhaps the laughter which it pro- 
vokes is less boisterous than that aroused by the first 
essays of her youth. But for a scene of high comedy — 
to select one from many — the first conversation of Miss 
Pratt and Uncle Adam would certainly be difficult to 
surpass. Finally, we have abundant evidence that in all 
that she wrote our authoress was actuated by a genuine 
desire for the moral and religious welfare of her reader ; 
but in comparison to that of Marriage^ her tone in this 
book is as is the influence of a well-guided life to a 
sententious homily delivered from a pulpit. In one 
word, there is no single point in her art in which she 
has not risen from what is crude and tentative to what 
is finished and masterly. 

As it well deserved to be, The Inheritance was a great 
success, and amongst those from whom it elicited warm com- 
mendation the names of Jeffrey and Sir Walter Scott may 
be particularised. Some of the chief comic actors of the 
day wished to have it produced upon the stage, with which 
object the manager of Covent Garden Theatre applied to 
Mrs Gore, the novelist, for a dramatic version of the 
story. But that lady^s intentions were anticipated by one 
Fitzball, a purveyor of transpontine wares in the kind, to 
whose unfitness for his task the complete failure of the 
play, when it came to be produced, may probably be 
ascribed. For in its strong, well-developed plot, and 
diversified characterisation, the story possesses in a high 
degree the chief requisites of a successful stage-play. The 
Inheritance has also the distinction of having furnished 
to Tennyson the outline of his beautiful ballad of Lady 
Clare, 



128 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Miss Ferrier was a very careful craftswoman — a fact to 
which much of her success has been attributed-— and it 
was not until 1831 that her next book, Destiny^ appeared. 
Much of it was written at Stirling Castle, while she 
was on a visit to the wife of the Governor of the 
garrison. The new novel was dedicated to Sir Walter 
Scott, to whom the authoress had good reason to feel 
obliged, for it was largely in consequence of his skilful 
bargaining that she had received for it the large sum 
of ;^i7oo from Cadell. The prices paid to her by 
Blackwood for her two previous books had been;^i5o 
and ;^iooo respectively. 

As The Inheritance represents the meridian of the 
writer's powers, so Destiny represents their decline — not 
because there are not some as good things, or very nearly 
as good things, in the latter as in the former, but because 
the whole is very much less good. The construction of 
Desti7iy is loose and inartificial, and almost from the 
outset the want of a strong frame-work which shall hold 
the contents together and keep them in place makes itself 
felt. Properly speaking, there are two stories in the story, 
— namely, that w^hich centres in the disposal of the Inch 
Orran property and the adventures of Ronald Malcolm, 
and that which concerns itself with the development of 
the relations between Edith and her recalcitrant lover. 
In itself of course this would be no defect, but instead 
of being interwoven, or subordinated one to the other, 
the two stories are allowed to run parallel and distinct 
until near the end of the book. Thus their interest is 
dissipated — an effect which diffuseness of treatment 
materially increases. Idle pages and straggling incidents 
abound, and in fact the sense of form which was so con- 



MISS FERRIER 129 

spicuous in The Inherita?ice is in Destiny conspicuous 
only by absence. 

If we judge it as an essay in character-painting, rather 
than as a story, no doubt the novel comes off better. 
Again, as in The Inheritance^ we have a gallery of 
masterly portraits — though this time the collection is 
smaller, and the paintings less highly-finished ; and again 
we feel that these portraits are drawn, not from some 
conventional limbo of the novelist's, but from observation 
of life itself, backed up by true imagination. Among the 
group, the Reverend Duncan M*Dow bears off the palm 
from all competitors. This insufferable person, imper- 
turbable in his own conceit — with his horse-laugh over 
his own jocularity, his grossness of manners, his greed 
for ' augmentation,' and his wounded self-love mingling 
with overweening vanity at the end of the book — is a 
piece of life itself, and the description of his luncheon- 
party is as good as anything accomplished by the authoress. 
The incarnation of fashionable selfishness and frivolity in 
the person of Lady Ehzabeth Malcolm runs him close ; but 
she is probably a less entirely original creation than the 
Minister — not that she is in any sense a copy, but that 
the same sort of model has been oftener studied. If we 
seek for something pleasanter to contemplate, the simple 
warm-hearted Molly Macauley, the dreamer of dreams, 
and the devoted adherent of the Chief who snubs her, 
is an endearing figure. The Chief himself, who loves 
good eating, and does not disdain to truckle to his rich 
childless kinsman, is a conspicuous example of materiali- 
sation and degeneracy, though the dotage of his * debili- 
tated mind and despotic temper ' becomes almost as 
tiresome to the reader as it became to Edith and Sir 

I 



I30 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Reginald. The key to the character of Benbowie, Glen- 
roy's echo, is not quite apparent, and we should have 
liked to be assured (as we believe) that it was mere 
ineptitude, and not meanness, which caused him to dis- 
appear so hastily on an important occasion when money 
was required, and to return bringing it with him when it 
could no longer be of use. The vignettes of Inch Orran, 
the * particular man,' and his wife, also stand out in the 
memory, as does that of the odious Madame Latour. 
And from this it will be seen that, with one or two 
exceptions, the more disagreeable personages of the book 
remain the most in evidence, for the Conways and the 
family of Captain Malcolm fade into insignificance beside 
those whose names are enumerated above. And, though 
the crux is an old one, where the high purpose of the 
writer is so much insisted on, perhaps it may not 
be unfair to enquire how far exactly she can be held to 
succeed in her aims, when even the regenerate reader is 
ill at ease in the company of her good characters and 
enjoys himself among her awful examples. The arti- 
ficiality of some of its dialogues and the triteness of some 
of its reflections are further symptoms of the enervation 
which has begun to invade the book. 

Miss Ferrier's history is the history of her books, and 
to these remarks upon her final literary production little 
need be added. Her mother being dead, and her three 
sisters married, it fell to her lot to keep house for her 
father, to whom she was devotedly attached, and with 
him she continued to reside until his death in January 
1829. Her life, which was divided between Morningside 
House and Edinburgh, and varied by occasional visits 
to her sisters, is described as a very quiet one, and if we 



MISS FERRIER 131 

may accept the Adam Ramsay of The Inheritance as at 
all a close portrait of Mr Ferrier, it must have had its 
grim side too. She had long suffered from her eyes, and 
in 1830 she paid her final visit to London, in order to 
consult an oculist. From his treatment, however, she 
seems to have derived little benefit; her eyesight failed, 
and it became necessary for her to spend much of her 
time in a darkened room ; and though she still continued 
occasionally to receive a few friends at tea in the evening, 
her life from henceforth was a very retired one. She 
died in Edinburgh, on the 5th November 1854, at the 
house of her brother, Mr Walter Ferrier, and was interred 
in St Cuthbert's Churchyard. 

Her dislike of publicity characterized her to the last. 
It was not until 1851, when a new edition of her works 
was published, that she consented to allow her name to 
appear upon the title-page, whilst her unwillingness to be 
made the subject of a biography led her to destroy all 
letters which might have been used for such a purpose, 
and in particular a correspondence with one of her sisters, 
which contained much biographical matter. The records 
of her life are consequently few, but the following testimony 
of an intimate friend is interesting : — 

* The wonderful vivacity she maintained in the midst of darkness 
and pain for so many years, the humour, wit, and honesty of her char- 
acter, as v^ell as the Christian submission with which she bore her great 
privation and general discomfort, when not suffering acute pain, made 
everyone who knew her desirous to alleviate the tediousness of her 
days ; and I used to read a great deal to her at one time, and I never 
left her darkened chamber without feeling that I had gained something 
better than the book we might be reading, from her quick perception 
of its faults and its beauties, and her unmerciful remarks on all that 
was mean or unworthy in conduct or expression,' 



132 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Still more interesting is the sentence in Scott's diary 
which describes her as * A gifted personage, having, 
besides her great talents, conversation the least exigeante 
of any author-female, at least, whom I have ever seen 
among the long list I have encountered ; simple, full of 
humour, and exceedingly ready at repartee, and all this 
without the least affectation of the blue-stocking.' Of 
her considerate kindness to the author of Waverhy^ then 
in failing health, on the occasion of her last visit to 
Abbotsford, Lockhart gives this pleasing description :- — 

* To assist in amusing him in the hours which he spent out of his 
study, and especially that he might make these hours more frequent, 
his daughter had invited his friend the authoress of Marriage to come 
out to Abbotsford ; and her coming was serviceable. For she knew 
and loved him well, and she had seen enough of affliction akin to his 
to be well skilled in dealing with it. She could not be an hour in his 
company without observing what filled his children with more sorrow 
than all the rest of the case. He would begin a story as gaily as ever, 
and go on, in spite of the hesitation in his speech, to tell it with highly 
picturesque effect ; but before he reached the point, it would seem as if 
some internal spring had given way. He paused and gazed around 
him with the blank anxiety of look that a blind man has when he has 
dropped his staff. Unthinking friends sometimes gave him the catch- 
word abruptly. I noticed the delicacy of Miss Ferrier on such occa- 
sions. Her sight was bad, and she took care not to use her glasses 
when he was speaking, and she affected also to be troubled with deaf- 
ness, and would say, *' Well, I am getting as dull as a post, I have 
not heard a word since you said so and so," being sure to mention a 
circumstance behind that at which he had really halted. He then 
took up the thread with his habitual smile of courtesy, as if forgetting 
his case entirely in the consideration of the lady's infirmity.' 

In conclusion, if Miss Ferrier's work lacks the sweet- 
ness and delicacy of Miss Austin's, it has at its best a 
strength to which her English sister's makes no preten- 
sion. The portraits of the former are bitten in with a 
powerful acid unknown in the chemistry of the latter. 



MISS FERRIER 133 

But if she was sometimes downright to the verge of 
cruelty, Miss Ferrier's view of life was a sound one. She 
strikes unsparingly at the rawness and self-sufficiency 
which are characteristic defects of such large numbers of 
our countrymen ; yet she remains without rival as a 
painter of Scottish society, and one at least of her novels 
deserves to rank with the masterpieces of British fiction. 



J 



MICHAEL SCOTT 

There used to be a tradition at Cambridge to the effect 
that an undergraduate, being called on in examination to 
give some account of John the Baptist, returned the 
answer, * Little or nothing is known of this extraordinary 
man,' — a reply which probably did not go far enough to 
satisfy the examiner. Scarcely more satisfying, however, 
must be the response of the biographer who is called on 
to gratify natural curiosity regarding the author of Tom 
Cringle's Log — scarcely more satisfying, though with appar- 
ently so much less of excuse. For it is only a little over 
sixty years since the death of Michael Scott. Neither was 
his a case of posthumous reputation, or of rehabilitation 
after long neglect, which might have accounted for the 
obscuring of biographical detail— his work, though it has 
lost nothing of popularity, or certainly of readableness in 
the interim, having been received with acclamation on 
its first appearance. And yet, after diligent and eager 
enquiry, the present writer finds himself forced to acknow- 
ledge that all but a meagre outline of the facts of Scott's 
life is lost. This is the more remarkable in that he was 
obviously no bookworm or literary recluse, and that all 
who know his writings will feel instinctively that one so 
characterised by humour and the love of good company — 
to say nothing of practical joking — should have strewn 
134 



MICHAEL SCOTT 135 

anecdote thick behind him wherever he went. But if this 
was so, his traces have been most effectually expunged. 
The sort of find which now rewards, or mocks, his would- 
be biographer is, for example, such a tradition as that 
which records that he was fond of whisky punch — a 
solitary survival in the mind of one who remembers him 
in Glasgow, but a trait which, considering the times 
and the society in which Scott lived, can scarcely be 
held as individual. This, however, is not the worst. 
The writer has reason to believe that the glorious sea 
masterpiece with which Scott's name is chiefly associated 
was written, or at least partly written, in a house now 
belonging to himself — namely, the secluded cottage of 
Birseslees, situated on the banks of Ale, in Roxburgh- 
shire. Such, at least, is the tradition which he received 
from his father, one constitutionally averse to random 
statement, who had himself occupied the cottage within 
ten years of Scott's decease, and who, as an enthusiastic 
yachtsman, familiar with the West Indies, had special 
reasons for being interested in his writings. Such testi- 
mony — as Mr Mowbray Morris, Scott's biographer, re- 
marks — is at least as good as that on which rest most of 
the statements regarding his life, and no apology is made 
for adducing it here. Yet, in despite of this testimony, a 
careful search, recently conducted among the oldest in- 
habitants of the neighbourhood, has failed to bring to light 
any but the vaguest and most uncertain references to the 
author of the Log, Under these conditions, what is left 
for a biographer to do ? He has no choice but to con- 
tent himself with a recapitulation of the few facts already 
current. One person, indeed, there is in whose power it 
almost certainly lies, by enlightening our ignorance, to 



136 FAMOUS SCOTS 

gratify our by no means unkindly curiosity; but it is 
generally understood that, for reasons which we have no 
right to challenge, and which at least in no wise concern 
the fair fame of the author, that person's lips are sealed. 

-^ It therefore now only remains to consider whether the 
darkness which surrounds Scott's life is the result of 
intention or of accident, and in support of the former 
conclusion it may be stated that, among men-of-letters of 
the time, taking their cue from the author of Waverley^ 
and the practice of Maga, there existed an undoubted 
taste for mystification; whilst that the younger Scott 
shared in it is proved by the facts that his true name was 
never known to his publisher otherwise than by hearsay, 
and that in his own family circle and that of his immediate 
acquaintances the identity of Tom Cringle was unknown/ 
One suggestion is that these measures were taken from a 
prudential point of view, in the interest of his business as 
a merchant, which might possibly have suffered had it 
been known to receive but divided attention. But as he 
avoided publicity in authorship, he may also have chosen 
to do so in other things. Otherwise, if internal evidence 
counts for anything, we should certainly suppose him to 
have been the least self-conscious of men, and one of the 
last in the world to trouble his head — unless he did it as 
a joke — as to what might be known, or not known, about 
himself. 

Under existing circumstances, to write the life of Scott 
is to reproduce the narrative of Mr Mowbray Morris. 
Born at Cowlairs, near Glasgow, on the 30th October 

jr^Sg, he was his father's fifth and youngest son. To 
that father, Allan Scott by name, the estate of Cowlairs 
had come from an elder brother, Robert, described as a 



MICHAEL SCOTT 137 

Glasgow merchant of good family, who had purchased it 
in 1778, — at which time the house stood in the country, 
though its site has long since been swallowed up by the 
encroachments of the town. Young Scott was sent first 
to the Grammar School, as the High School of Glasgow 
was then called, and afterwards to the University, where 
he matriculated when just twelve years of age. Aird 
states that he was at school with John Wilson. At the 
University he remained four years, during the latter part 
of which he had as his inseparable companion the future 
author of Cyril Thornton^ a fellow-student of tastes akin 
to his own, who has furnished in that novel a picture of 
the college life of the time. /At the University Scott does 
not appear to have gained distinction. Perhaps, like 
many another author in embryo, he preferred miscel- 
laneous reading to the college course; at any rate, the 
few literary allusions scattered over the pages of his books 
are generally apt and appreciative. However his taste 
seems to have been for active life, spiced if possible by 
adventure, and accordingly, in 1806, we find him leaving 
Scotland for the West Indies. 

At this point Mr Morris, our authority, makes a digres- 
sion in order to describe the magnitude and antiquity of 
the Clyde shipping-trade, and the effect exercised upon it 
by the revolt of our American colonies, which, by divert- 
ing it from Virginia to the West Indies, had changed its 
staple from tobacco to sugar. It happened that a family 
friend of the Scotts, Bogle by name — a Glasgow merchant 
and the descendant of Glasgow merchants — had at that 
time a nephew resident in Jamaica, where he was occupied 
as an estate-agent, and on his own account as a trader. 
To the care of this gentleman young Scott is now sup- 



138 FAMOUS SCOTS 

posed to have been consigned, that he might be taught 
an estate-agent's duties. The agent's name was George 
Wilham Hamilton, and one feels sure that no admirer 
of the Log will hear with indifference that in him 
Scott found the original of the most individual of his 
many droll planter portraits — the portrait of Aaron 
Bang. 

^ After profiting for three or four years by the instructions 
of Hamilton, who combined with his humorous propen- 
sities a very decided talent for business, in the year 1810 
Scott entered a mercantile house at Kingston, in the 
employment of which he continued for seven years more. 
* These years,' says Mr Morris, ' were the making of the 
Log, His business, coupled with Hamilton's friendship, 
not only brought him into contact with every phase of 
society in Jamaica, but sent him on frequent voyages 
among the islands and to the Spanish Main; and cer- 
tainly few travellers can have carried a more curious pair 
of eyes with them than Michael Scott, or entered more 
heartily into the spirit of the passing hour.' In 181 7 he 
returned to Scotland, and in the year following married 
Margaret, daughter of the Mr Bogle previously referred to, 
and consequently first cousin to Hamilton. He was soon 
back in Jamaica, however, and it was presumably at this 
time that he occupied the house — situated high up among 
the Blue Mountains, in midst of some of the finest scenery 
in the world — which is still shown to visitors as his. He 
remained in Jamaica till 1822, when he finally returned 
to his native land to start business on his own account. 
This he seems to have combined with a share in other 
mercantile concerns, being at the time of his death a 
partner in a commission-house in Glasgow, as well as in 



MICHAEL SCOTT 139 

a Scottish commercial house in Maracaybo, on the Spanish 
Main. 

It was in 1829 that he first appeared as an author, in 
which year — again to quote Mr Morris — * the Log began 
to make its appearance in Blackwood's Magazine as a 
disconnected series of sketches, published intermittently 
as the author supplied them, or as the editor found it 
convenient to print them. The first five, for instance, 
appeared in September and November, 1829, and in 
June, July and October, 1830, under the titles of "A 
Scene off Bermuda," "The Cruise of H.M.S. Torch^' 
" Heat and Thirst — a Scene in Jamaica," " Davy Jones 
and the Yankee Privateer," and the " Quenching of the 
Torch " ; a^d these five papers now constitute the third 
chapter.' / But shrewd Mr Blackwood, who greatly 
admired the sketches, persuaded the author to give them 
some sort of connecting link, * which, without binding 
him to the strict rules of narrative composition, would 
add a strain of personal and continuous interest in the 
movement of the story. The young midshipman accord- 
ingly began to cut a more conspicuous figure; and in 
July, 1832, the title of "Tom Cringle's Log" was pre- 
fixed to what is now the eighth, but was then called 
the eleventh chapter. Henceforward the Log proceeded 
regularly each month, with but one intermission, to its 
conclusion in August, 1833 '; and a few months later, 
after some final touches, it made its appearance as a 
book. Its success was immediate. It was hailed with 
applause in particular by Coleridge, Christopher North, 
and Albany Fonblanque — the first-named of whom 
pronounced it 'most excellent.' Lockhart in the 
Quarterly Review^ in an article on *Monk' Lewis's 



I40 FAMOUS SCOTS 

West Indian travels, also speaks of it as the most 
brilliant series of magazine papers of the time; whilst 
the Scottish Literary Gazette for November 1833 con- 
cludes a glowing notice by adjuring the writer, w^hatever 
he may undertake next, to remember that he is the 
author of Tom Cri?tgle^s Log, 

/ Its successor, The Cruise of the Midge^ made a more 
regular progress, from its commencement in March 1834, 
to its conclusion in June of the following year, though it 
also required some final overhauling before its appearance 
as a volume. These two books constitute the literary 
output of their author, and the completion of the Cruise 
of the Midge brings us within a short distance of his 
death, which occurred at his house in Glasgow * on the 
7th November 1835, ^vhen he had just completed his 
forty-sixth year. A large family survived to mourn his 
loss./ He is buried in the Necropolis, w^iere an unpre- 
tending monument marks his resting-place and that of 
his wife and several of their children. In the inscription 
which it bears, no allusion whatever is made to his 
literary achievements. I have been told that in private 
life Scott was a quiet easy-going man, of modest and 
retiring disposition, and also, on the authority of an old 
lady who remembers his death, that great was the surprise 
in Glasgow when it became known that he had been the 
author of thrilling tales of adventure by sea and land. It 
is said, by the way, that certain of Cringle's adven- 
tures were drawn from the experiences of a Captain 
Hobson, father of the Arctic explorer of that name, w^ho 
when a lieutenant, about the year 182 1, was engaged 
in putting down piracy in the West Indies. The char- 

* No. 198 AthoU Place. Article in Glasgow Herald^ ist May 1895. 



MICHAEL SCOTT 141 

acter of Paul Gelid can likewise be traced to an 
original. 

Here ends what is to be known about Scott's life, and 
if it is with regret that we accept this fact as inevitable, 
there is at least a certain consolation to be derived from 
reflecting that, in this prying age, at least one gallant 
literary figure stands secure from the mishandling of 
meddlers. But — the author himself having evaded the 
biographer — it is scarcely less remarkable that the 
popularity of his works seems to have won them no 
adequate eulogy. For, so far as I know, w^e may search 
in vain among critical essays for an appreciation of 
these masterpieces. Possibly their character as books of 
adventure relegated to the boys' shelf may be in part 
accountable for this ; whilst doubtless the frequent rough- 
ness and homeliness of their style — whether casual, or 
introduced for the purpose of fitting the speech to the 
speaker — may have scared off many such pedants and 
wiseacres as have yet to learn that mere correctness is one 
of the very humblest of literary qualities, or at least that 
genius — so it be genius — is like King Sigismund, above 
the grammar-books. At an age when most boys are still 
puzzling over syntax and orthography, Mr Thomas 
Cringle and Lieutenant Benjamin Brail had already 
brought stout hearts and ready hands to bear upon the 
work of men, and it is quite true that in the records of 
their experiences not only do we find foreigners talking 
their own languages very imperfectly, but also the authors 
themselves from time to time making use of faulty con- 
structions and of novel spelling. Now had their business 
been mainly an affair of words and phrases, this had been 
serious indeed ; but as, instead, it happens to be one of 



142 FAMOUS SCOTS 

thoughts, feelings, sensations, and the art of communi- 
cating them, the case is very different. And we may 
add that had any man composed ten times as loosely 
as Cringle sometimes chose to do, whilst still retain- 
ing Cringle's power to make us see and feel with him, 
that man had still remained a most remarkable writer. 
However already more than enough has been said on the 
subject of these few and very trifling errors, which in fact 
interfere not at all with a style which is usually clear, 
nervous and straightforward. 

As has been already indicated, Scott's principal literary 
gift lay in his power of presentation — his power, that is, 
of putting simply, sufficingly, and without redundancy, a 
scene or person before the reader, so that he shall see the 
one and hear the other speak. From the days of Homer 
to those of the world-wide success of the youngest of our 
distinguished novelists, this gift has been recognised as 
quintessential in the story - teller. In the two broad 
classes of temperaments, it is wont to assume two separate 
forms, which differ from one another — in class-room terms 
— as the objective from the subjective. Of the latter of these 
— by virtue of which a reader is compelled so completely to 
identify himself with scenes depicted that he not only seems 
to witness them, but actually for the time being to partici- 
pate and play the leading part in them — the works of 
Currer Bell, and perhaps especially Villette^ the most 
highly-finished of her novels, afford notable examples. 
The converse side of the gift is displayed by the virile and 
active temperament of Michael Scott ; and, of this particu- 
lar quality, many a writer of far higher reputation has 
possessed greatly less than he. In illustration of this, the 
example of his greater namesake may be quoted, for with 



MICHAEL SCOTT 143 

all his many other excellences, Sir Walter's pictorial or 
mimetic effects are seldom, or never, perfectly ' clean ' — 
direct, and free from surplusage or alloy. Michael Scott's, 
on the other hand, are about as direct as it is possible to 
be. / Illustrations might be quoted at will, for if there is 
on^ thing more surprising than the gift itself, it is the 
lavish use made of it by its possessor on page after page 
of his writings. The following characteristic scene may 
serve as an example, and it must be borne in mind that all 
Scott's fine scenes are incidental : he never, so to speak, 
makes a point of them. 

* It was eleven o'clock in the forenoon, a fine clear breezy day, 
fresh and pleasant, sometimes cloudy overhead, but always breaking 
away again, with a bit of a sneezer, and a small shower. As the sun 
rose there were indications of squalls in the north-eastern quarter, and 
about noon one of them was whitening to windward. So •' hands by 
the top-gallant clew-lines " was the word, and we were all standing 
by to shorten sail, when the Commodore came to the wind as sharp 
and suddenly as if he had anchored ; but on a second look, I saw his 
sheets were let fly. The wind, ever since noon, had been blowing in 
heavy squalls, with appaUing lulls between them. One of these gusts 
had been so violent as to bury in the sea the lee-guns in the waist, 
although the brig had nothing set but her close-reefed main-top-sail, 
and reefed foresail. It was now spending its fury, and she was 
beginning to roll heavily, when, w^ith a suddenness almost incredible 
to one unacquainted with these latitudes, the veil of mist that had 
hung to windward the whole day was rent and drawn aside, and the 
red and level rays of the setting sun flashed at once, through a long 
arch of glowing clouds, on the black hull and tall spars of his 
Britannic Majesty's sloop, Torch, And, true enough, we were not 
the only spectators of this gloomy splendour ; for, right in the wake 
of the moonlike sun, now half sunk in the sea, at the distance of a 
mile or more, lay a long warlike-looking craft, apparently a frigate or 
heavy corvette, rolling heavily and silently in the trough of the sea, 
with her masts, yards, and the scanty sail she had set, in strong relief 
against the glorious horizon,' 



144 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Or this — 

* The anchorage was one unbroken mirror, except where its glass- 
like surface was shivered into sparkling ripples by the gambols of a 
skipjack, or the flashing stoop of his enemy the pelican ; and the re- 
flection of the vessel was so clear and steady, that at the distance of a 
cable's length you could not distinguish the water-line, nor tell where 
the substance ended and shadow began, until the casual dashing 
of a bucket overboard for a few moments broke up the phantom 
ship ; but the wavering fragments soon reunited, and she again floated 
double, like the swan of the poet. The heat was so intense, that the 
iron stancheons of the awning could not be grasped with the hand, 
and where the decks were not screened by it, the pitch boiled out 
from the seams. The swell rolled in from the offing in long shining 
undulations, like a sea of quicksilver, whilst every now and then a 
flying-fish would spark out from the unruffled bosom of the heaving 
water, and shoot away like a silver arrow, until it dropped with a flash 
into the sea again. There was not a cloud in the heavens, but a 
quivering blue haze hung over the land, through which the white 
sugar-works and overseers' houses on the distant estates appeared 
to twinkle like objects seen through a thin smoke, whilst each of the 
tall stems of the cocoa-nut trees on the beach, when looked at stead- 
fastly, seemed to be turning round with a small spiral motion, like so 
many endless screws. There was a dreamy indistinctness about the 
outlines of the hills, even in the immediate vicinity, which increased 
as they receded, until the Blue Mountains in the horizon melted into 
sky. The crew were listlessly spinning oakum, and mending sails, 
under the shade of the awning ; the only exceptions to the general 
languor were John Crow, the black, and Jacko the monkey. The 
former (who was an itnprovisatore of a rough stamp) sat out on the 
bowsprit, through choice, beyond the shade of the canvas, without 
hat or shirt, like a bronze bust, busy with his task, whatever that 
might be, singing at the top of his pipe, and between whiles con- 
fabulating with his hairy ally, as if he had been a messmate. The 
monkey was hanging by the tail from the dolphin-striker, admiring 
what John Crow called ** his own dam ogly face in the water." 

* Tail like yours would be good ting for a sailor, Jacko ; it would 
leave his two hands free aloft — more use, more hornament, too, I'm 
sure, den de piece of greasy junk dat hangs from de captain's taffril. — 
Now I shall sing to you, how dat Corromantee rascal, my fader, was 
sell me on de Gold Coast — 



MICHAEL SCOTT 145 

* '* Two red nightcap, one long knife, 
All him get for Quacko, 
For gun next day him sell him wife — 
You tink dat good song, Jacko ? " 

* " Chocko, chocko," chattered the monkey, as if in answer. 

* *'Ah, you tink so — sensible hominal ! — What is dat! shark? — 
Jacko, come up, sir : don't you see dat big shovel-nosed fis looking at 
you ? Pull your hand out of the water — Garamighty ! " 

' The negro threw himself on the gammoning of the bowsprit to 
take hold of the poor ape, who, mistaking his kind intention, and 
ignorant of his danger, shrunk from him, lost his hold, and fell into 
the sea. The shark instantly sank to have a run, then dashed at his 
prey, raising his snout over him, and shooting his head and shoulders 
three or four feet out of the water, with poor Jacko shrieking in his 
jaws, whilst his small bones crackled and crunched under the monster's 
triple row of teeth.' 

To this talent for presentation, by a most fortunate 
coincidence, Scott's experience enabled him to add a com- 
mand of rich and rare material : his subject-matter was 
quite worthy of the powers which he brought to bear upon 
it. Indeed, few literary men have been more favoured by 
time and place. For, letting alone the fact that the West 
Indies were in those days virgin soil to the romance-writer, 
letting alone the glorious opportunities afforded by a fami- 
liarity with Nature in the tropics, studied in storm and calm, 
by land and sea — and especially to a man of Scott's taste 
for strong effects, one gifted with his eye for atmosphere, 
whose genius itself has something of tropical grandeur 
and luxuriance, were these opportunities valuable, — letting 
alone, also, the rich and varied social order amid which he 
moved — its quaint and original types of planter and sea- 
man, the picturesqueness of its desperadoes, and the 
naivete of its coloured people — Scott's sojourn in the islands 
was timed at a particularly stirring epoch in their history. 



146 FAMOUS SCOTS 

Warfare, smuggling and piracy, slavery and the suppression 
of the slave-trade were being carried on before his eyes ; 
and it is even suggested that such scenes as the boarding 
of the Wave, the examination of Job Rumble-tithump, 
and the trial and execution of the pirates, may very 
probably have had their foundation in things actually wit- 
nessed by the writer. Now I suppose that I am not sin- 
gular, and that like myself many genuine lovers of romance 
delight to cherish the belief that what they are reading, if 
not actually true, is at least in some way related to the 
author's experience. In this respect Scott satisfies us per- 
fectly. And herein lies his immense advantage over other 
competitors in the same field. For in reading, for in- 
stance (admirable as they are), the pirate scenes of the 
Master of Ballantrae, we cannot but miss this sense, — so 
that whilst we hear with bated breath of bloody deeds and 
hairbreadth 'scapes, we are haunted all the while by an 
uneasy feeling that this is all but a most brilliantly exe- 
cuted/a;^ to/a, or variation, upon documents. 

Granting, then, that rarely if ever have more brilliant 
pictures of more interesting incidents been more lavishly 
set before a reader than in the pages of Tom Cringle's 
Log, we are impelled to enquire what are the correspond- 
ing weaknesses which have debarred the author from taking 
the highest rank as a writer. The answer is not far to 
seek; it is a defect of constructive power. If he pos- 
sessed much genius, Michael Scott had but little art. 
The effect of his fine pictures is not cumulative ; each is 
alike revealed, as it were, by a powerful flash, and the 
result is that they obliterate one another. For it is surely 
needless to point out that every work of high artistic 
achievement is a whole, and that in that whole, and in 



MICHAEL SCOTT 147 

relation to that whole, each part has a value greatly 
exceeding its value when considered separately. But in 
Scott's stories this is not so. Remove any one incident 
from one of his stories, and the reader will be the poorer 
by the loss of an interesting incident, and by no more. 
And so, with injury only of the same kind, his books 
might be extended or curtailed, whilst their incidents 
might be transposed without injury at all. I am aware 
that to write in this somewhat heavily academic style of a 
writer than whom no man of equal gifts made ever less 
pretention, may be to incur the imputation of taking too 
high a ground, and to draw down criticism upon the 
critic's head. I can only reply that the extreme excellence, 
within their own limits, of Scott's literary achievements 
has provoked me to it, and that had his works shown less 
surprising merit they should have been treated in a lighter 
vein. 

The same neglect of constructive power which strikes 
us in the conduct of the tales is apparent in the treatment 
of the characters. It is the practice of masters of char- 
acterisation to make their characters, so to speak, tiir]i 
round before the reader, so that, ere the end of the book is 
reached, no aspect of them shall have been left unseen. 
But with Scott one aspect is exhibited repeatedly, and 
thus our knowledge is circumscribed. That the characters 
live we feel assured, but with one or two such exceptions 
as Aaron and Obed, it is as members of a class that we 
recognise them, not as individuals^ whilst again and again 
as we read we are compelled to turn back would we dis 
tinguish from his fellows any particular one among the 
quaintly-named officers and seamen. 

In female portraiture Scott attempts but little, in which 



148 FAMOUS SCOTS 

he is probably well-advised. For though Cringle's sweet- 
heart is certainly a pleasing sketch enough, in his more 
ambitious and quasi-Byronic flights — the delineation of the 
pirate's leman or the bride of Adderfang — the author for 
the moment leaves nature behind him, and consequently 
gives us almost the only passages in his books which 
do not ring true. These passages may perhaps be held 
to justify the condemnation of Captain Marryat, who 
pronounced him melodramatic. But — despite the strong 
nature of the fare which he provides — melodramatic, 
except in such passages, he certainly is not. For to 
describe thrilling situations, with the eye not fixed upon 
the situations themselves but intent on their effect^ is melo- 
drama in the true sense ; and of this the genial author 
of The Pirate and Three Cutters himself supplies some 
choice examples. 

It strikes a reader as strange that the occasion of 
Cringle's visit to Carthagena evokes no allusion to Smol- 
lett, for it is with Smollett and Marryat that we most 
naturally think of comparing Cringle's creator. Michael 
Scott does not rise to the Cervantic heights of humour 
of the former ; but few, indeed, are the writers who have 
done this. Nor, of course, has he Smollett's style; though, 
on the other side of the account, with thankfulness we 
acknowledge that his page is quite free from Smollett's 
filth and coarseness. Marryat also possessed more of 
the gifts of the novelist than Scott, or at least had greater 
opportunities of showing them. But there is one point, 
and that a most telling one, in which Scott has immea- 
surably the advantage of the others — he comes far nearer 
to the reader than either of them. Of course his easy 
and homely style, his use of the first person, his occa- 



MICHAEL SCOTT 149 

sional confidential digressions, are means employed 
towards this end, but equally of course the secret of his 
success lies in his personality. Personality, or, in other 
words, genius it is which gives him his power over the 
reader — a power which makes even the refractory and 
fastidious to follow him, as a dog follows its master. 
Constitutionally a reader may have small relish for farce, 
and a positive distaste for horse-play; and yet when 
Scott is in the mood for either, the reader will become 
so too. And in a higher and sweeter kind of humour, 
his power is equally in proportion to the demand of the 
occasion — in support of which I can cite no better evidence 
than the delightful scenes in which the sailors of the 
Midge seek to resuscitate the apparently drowned baby 
boy, afterwards nicknamed Dicky Phantom ; and in which 
their joy is expressed when he gives signs of life; with 
Dogvane*s mission to the officer in command to plead 
on behalf of his mess-mates for the custody of the child 
(which shall replace in their affections a parrot blown away 
in a gale, a monkey washed overboard, and a cat which 
has died of cold) and the subsequent scenes in which, 
with a comical shamefaced roundaboutness, one after 
another, to the admiral himself, puts in his claim for the 
care of the babe. Scenes more winningly human than 
these would, I think, be far to seek. In equal degree 
does this beloved writer hold the key to our manlier 
enthusiasms. Far distant be the day when amongst 
generous-minded boys such books as his shall lose their 
popularity, for it is by these that the best lessons of our 
history are enforced. It has been said of the playwright 
Shakespeare that his works are proof that he had it in 
him to strike a stout blow in a good cause. The spirit 



150 FAMOUS SCOTS . 

of Agincourt was not found wanting at Trafalgar, and 
the same may be said with truth of the Glasgow merchant, 
Scott. The voice of Britain's greatness itself speaks in 
his books, and as we read them we seem brought nearer 
to the spirit of Drake or of Dundonald. 

In conclusion, Scott's stories have here been considered 
together, for though the Log is on the whole justly the 
favourite of the two, in general characteristics they are 
almost identical. Quite towards the close, both books 
display some slight tendency to ' drag,' but in this respect 
the Cruise is the worse transgressor. It is also the more 
loosely put together, and this despite the fact that in the 
relations subsisting between Lennox and Adderfang, and 
the mystery which surrounds young De Walden, the author 
has obviously been at pains to sustain interest by some- 
thing in the nature of a plot. Again, if he does not repeat 
himself in the O'uise, Scott at least does not steer quite 
clear of all danger of doing so; for, in addition to the 
fact that the general pattern of the two tales is the same, 
several incidents of the latter have counterparts in the 
former. And yet, on the whole, such fine books are they 
both that to criticise either is deservedly to incur the 
imputation of being spoiled with good things. 



THOMAS HAMILTON 

The statement — somewhat disquieting to the professed 
litterateur — that almost any man may if he choose write 
one good book in a life-time, finds something like con- 
firmation in the case of Thomas Hamilton. Not 
primarily a writer, and not gifted by nature with any 
very remarkable talent or grace of the pen, he yet con- 
trived to produce a book for which a few transcripts of 
military life in peace and war, a few pictures of travel, 
perhaps a portrait or two drawn from the life, have 
sufficed to preserve, after seventy years, a portion of the 
favour with which it was greeted on its first appearance. 
The materials for a sketch of his career are scanty, but 
blanks in the narrative may to some extent be filled in 
from a perusal of Cyril Thornton, 

Born in the year 1789, he was the younger son of 
William Hamilton, Professor of Anatomy and Botany in 
the University of Glasgow, his elder brother becoming in 
time Sir William Hamilton, the celebrated metaphysician 
and intellectual luminary of Edinburgh. He was put to 
school in the south of England, and about the year 1803 
entered the Glasgow University, where he studied for 
three winters, giving evidence, as his brother has borne 
witness, of ability rather than of application. His taste 
for a military life was at first opposed, but having satisfied 
his friends by experiment that he was unsuited for a 



152 FAMOUS SCOTS 

commercial career, in 1810 he obtained by purchase a 
commission in the 29th Regiment. He had hardly joined, 
when the corps was ordered out to active service in the 
Peninsula, where it bore the brunt of the hardly-won 
battle of Albuera, in which Hamilton himself was 
wounded by a musket bullet in the thigh. During his 
short military career, he was once more on active service 
in the Peninsula, and also served in Nova Scotia and 
New Brunswick during the American War, subsequent to 
which he returned to Europe, his regiment being sent as 
part of the army of occupation to France. Retiring on 
half-pay about the year 1818, he came to reside in 
Edinburgh, and began to turn his attention to literature. 
He had received a good classical education, and being 
well introduced, he was hailed as a congenial spirit 
by the Blackwood circle, and becoming associated 
with the magazine, threw himself into the spirit of the 
enterprise, to which he furnished contributions both in 
verse and prose. In the Nodes Ambrostance he occa- 
sionally figures as 'O'Doherty,' a name, however, which 
was also applied to Dr Maginn. He is described in 
Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk as possessing a * noble 
grand Spaniard-looking head,' with a very sombre expres- 
sion of countenance, and a tall graceful person. The 
natural freedom of his movements seems, however, to 
have been to some extent impeded by his wound. 
Carlyle, who knew him later, describes him as a 
'pleasant, very courteous, and intelligently talking man, 
enduring, in a cheery military humour, his old Peninsular 
hurts,' and altogether it is easy to see that he must have 
formed an interesting and popular figure in the Edin- 
burgh society of his day. 



THOMAS HAMILTON 153 

Having married in 1820, he resided for several 
summers at the picturesque little dwelling of Chiefs- 
wood, near Melrose, where he had an appreciative 
neighbour in the person of Sir Walter Scott, and where 
the greater part of the Youth and Manhood of Cyril 
Thornton was written. This book appeared in 1827, 
and at once attracted attention. In 1829, the author 
followed it up with Annals of the Peninsular Campaigns^ 
from 1808 to 1 8 14, and in 1833, after a visit to the New 
World, by Men and Manners in America, In later life, 
having lost his first wife and married again, he settled at 
Elleray, in the Lake District, where he saw a good deal 
of Wordsworth, of whom he had long been an admirer, 
frequently, as we are told, accompanying the poet upon 
long mountain walks. His death, occasioned by a shock 
of paralysis, took place at Pisa, whilst he was travelling 
with Mrs Hamilton, on the 7th December 1842. He 
was buried at Florence. 

No doubt the novel of Cyril Thornton has in time past 
owed much of its popularity to its varied action and 
frequently shifting scene, and if we are to judge it now 
on literary grounds we have no choice but to acknow- 
ledge that great portion of its interest has perished. 
Still, there remain a few admirable passages, and in this 
particular instance the lines of cleavage between true and 
false are marked with peculiar distinctness. For the 
book may be described as fragments of autobiography 
embedded in a paste of romance. Now imagination was 
by no means Hamilton's strong point; his fancy was 
neither very happy nor very abundant, and when he 
essays character-painting on an important scale — as in 
the case of old David SpreuU, the conventional eccentric 



154 FAMOUS SCOTS 

but beneficent uncle of the story, and his faithful servant 
Girzy, he is as deficient in anything like true insight as 
he is in lightness of touch. But though his fiction is of 
this heavy quality, he could present to admiration what 
he himself had seen and taken part in, and from time to 
time he has thought fit to do so, with excellent effect, 

Cyril Thornton is the scion of an old county family, 
who, at a very early age, has the misfortune accidentally 
to kill his elder brother. His father's affection is in 
consequence alienated from him, and he grows up under 
a cloud. In time he is sent to the University, and the 
scene of the story shifts to Glasgow, thus affording 
opportunity for some scathing portraiture of the merchant 
life of that city. At Glasgow Cyril makes the acquaint- 
ance of his uncle, and by the amiability and independence 
of his character conquers the affection of the rich old 
childless man. He has now arrived at mean's estate, and 
whilst visiting his aristocratic connection, the Earl of 
Amersham, at Staunton Court, he sees, loves, and is 
beloved by, the beautiful and fascinating Lady Melicent, 
the daughter of the house. Their scarcely-avovred attach- 
ment is interrupted by the fatal illness of Cyril's mother, 
and being summoned to return home with all speed, Cyril 
is there informed that, in a spirit of cruel vindictiveness, 
his father has disinherited him. His gloom deepens, 
and after some further romantic and amatory experience, 
at length — alas ! it is, indeed, at length — he joins the army. 
This is what we have been waiting for, and our patience 
is now rewarded. At first he is quartered at Halifax, 
where, at that time, the Duke of Kent was Commander- 
in-Chief, and we are treated to a satirical portrait of His 
Royal Highness, followed by a good deal of interesting 



THOMAS HAMILTON 



:>D 



description of the military life of those days, interspersed 
with characteristic anecdote, and varied by love-intrigue 
and a duel. Then follow travel and sea-faring, with 
eloquent picture of an ascent of the Peak of Teneriffe, of 
the Bermuda islands, and Gibraltar. Whilst Cyril is at 
the last-named station, the vicissitudes of military life are 
illustrated by an outbreak of yellow-fever, and when he is 
on his way back to England the transport ship which 
bears him becomes engaged with a French privateer. 
From all this it will be seen that of incident and move- 
ment there is no lack, yet it is not until after the outbreak 
of the Spanish War of Independence, when the hero is 
ordered with his regiment to the Peninsula, that our 
expectations are fully satisfied. In such passages as, for 
instance, those which describe the storming of the heights 
of Roleia, the night spent by Cyril on out-piquet duty, or 
the capture of the fort witnessed by the light of fire-balls, 
we have, not only the scenes of war, but the poetry of the 
soldier's life set before us to admiration. Scarcely less 
excellent is the account of Cyril's further service under 
WelHngton, Sir Rowland Hill, and Marshal Beresford, at 
the lines of Torres Vedras, the siege of Badajos, and the 
battle of Albuera, our interest in which is greatly 
strengthened by knowledge that the writer was himself 
a part of what he describes. Our only regret is that he 
has devoted so comparatively little of his book to what 
he does so well. For all too soon we have the hero back 
in London once more, frightfully disfigured by a wound 
received in action, and as a consequence slighted by the 
dazzling but shallow Lady Melicent, who before had 
looked so graciously upon the handsome soldier. And 
now the novel begins to drag lamentably. The hero's 



156 FAMOUS SCOTS 

domestic misfortunes strike us as superfluous, whilst the 
madhouse scenes, where the characters discourse in * poetic 
prose,' are in the basest style of melodrama. Nor do we 
care enough for Mr SpreuU and his Girzy to have much 
patience with the languid and long-drawn concluding 
scenes in which they take part. Suffice it then to say 
that, ere we bid adieu to Cyril, he is restored to his family 
estate, enriched by the inheritance of his uncle's fortune, 
and consoled for the loss of the fickle Melicent by worth 
and affection in the person of Laura Willoughby, the 
friend of his youth. 

The writer of the obituary of Hamilton in Blackwood is 
eloquent in praise of the literary style of the book. But 
when we find the novelist, who writes in the first person, 
declaring that ^ the elements of thought and feeling w^ithin 
him were conglomerated into confused and inextricable 
masses,' or describing a housemaid as being ' busied in 
her matutinal vocation,' or alluding to the * supereroga- 
tory decoration of shaving,' or, when he wishes to inform 
us that there was a doctor in a certain village, employing 
the locution that the village ^ had the advantage of includ- 
ing in its population a professor of the healing art,' — then 
we dispute the competency of his critic. This inflation of 
style is the more curious in that, fortified by his English 
education, Hamilton, like Miss Ferrier, is by no means 
inclined to deal mercifully with the foibles of his country- 
men, as is amply shown by his portrait of Mr Archibald 
Shortridge, or his account of the visit of the five Miss 
Spreulls, of Balmalloch, and their mother to Bath. But 
for this we should naturally have passed over any slips in 
his own style, preferring to regard them as the not un- 
amiable lapses of a hand more skilled to wield the sword 



THOMAS HAMILTON 157 

than drive the pen. His book on the Peninsular Cam- 
paigns is written in good straightforward English, but in 
Men and Manners in America he again falls victim to the 
temptation never to use one word where two will do 
nearly as well. When the characters in Cyril Thornton 
converse — be they officers in the army, charming young 
ladies, peers of the realm, or (like Miss Mansfield) 
daughters of respectable tradesmen — they uniformly make 
use of finely rounded and elaborately constructed periods, 
preferring as a rule the third person as a form of address 
— as, for instance, when a lady, addressing the hero, 
observes, ^ I should be surprised to hear that Captain 
Thornton was of those,' and so on. This, however, is, of 
course, no fault of the author's, but simply a not ungraceful 
literary convention of the age in which he wrote. 

Though he professed Whig politics, Hamilton's pose 
throughout his writings is one of aristocratic hauteur, and 
we are consequently the less surprised to learn that the 
book in which he embodied his observations on America 
gave dire offence in that country, provoking angry re- 
prisals. It may be that the comments of the gallant 
captain are made occasionally in a spirit neither wholly 
free from insular prejudice, nor from that particular 
pedantry which is sometimes generated by a military 
training. But it is also manifest that the existence which 
he surveyed — in a world, as must be remembered, at that 
time really new— -was in many respects a sufficiently bare, 
comfortless, inelegant, and unrefined one, strangely lack- 
ing in the elements of elevation in public or private life. 
Hamilton strove to judge it fairly, and his observations 
are those of an intelligent and honest critic. Passing 
easily, as they do, from grave to gay — now commenting 



iS8 FAMOUS SCOTS 

on the tendencies of democratic government or of the 
tariff, now comparing the constitutions of the different 
States, now describing the prison or scholastic systems of 
the country, and now touching upon the beauty and the 
dress of the ladies, upon dinner parties, modes of eating, 
barbarisms of language, and the like — they may be read 
with interest and historically not without profit to this 
day. 

Of his Annals of the Peninsular Campaigns^ the author 
tells us that it was intended to appeal to a wider public 
than was likely to be available for the lengthy histories of 
Napier and Southey, its object being to extend a know- 
ledge of the great achievements of the British arms and 
an appropriate pride in them. Hamilton had special 
qualifications for the task, and he supplied an admirably 
terse and lucid narrative, but this was not accomplished 
without a sacrifice of much of that picturesque and personal 
detail which does so much to save history from dryness, 
and to make it attractive and memorable to the general 
reader. So that his end was but half attained. 



FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 

The following Volumes are in preparation: — 

NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood. 
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. 
GEORGE BUCHANAN. By Robert Wallace, M. P. 
JEFFREY AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWERS. By 

Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid. 
ADAM SMITH. By Hector C. Macpherson. 
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis Barbe. 
MUNGO park. By T. Banks Maclachlan. 
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart. 
JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne. 
DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood. 



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